Given that the “erratic mode” only impacts the beginning of the run and disappears suddenly at known locations, this sounds like an issue of delayed GPS lock.
And given that the problem didn’t exist in the past, it could be a software issue due to upgrades. Or it could be a hardware issue that developed over time, such as something impacting GPS receive sensitivity. Or it could even be a new source of RF interference in the GPS range near the author’s start point, which impacts GPS lock until they get far enough away from it.
Interesting issue, but note that this issue appears to be specific to this one specific person, not a general issue with all Apple Watches as some in this thread are speculating. I certainly have not noticed this behavior on my Watch even with the latest updates.
Based on this article they've fixed it for Ultra, at least https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2022/09/apple-watch-ultra-in-dep...
> Assuming you’re ready to go, then you’ve got two choices with Apple Watch Ultra. You could go the ‘normal’ route for all Apple Watches up till now, and wait for the 3-second countdown. Once that countdown completes, it’s at that point that the watch goes off and gets GPS signal and HR acquisition – not before. However, the Ultra edition includes a new ‘Precision Start’ feature, that lets you first open the workout up, then see the signal status before you begin
I’ve had a few instances where the running track gets all wonky when I go through something like a long underpass tunnel. It’s long enough to miss a GPS signal for many minutes. Instead, it guesses where I am based on distance to cell towers (I think). Or at least, that’s what the running trace seemed like to me. Everytime I went under a tunnel, I found out later that I ran a 3 minute mile — on miles 16, 20, and 22 (that’s not possible).
Now I just disable Bluetooth on my watch entirely while doing long runs. I’ve found the watch by itself to be more accurate, in general.
It just doesn't work.
- Sleep for 3h - wake up for 1, sleep for 5 more: records 3h only.
- (being a parent of a small baby) do not sleep at all during the night, sleep 4+3 hours during the day: 0 hours recorded
- sleep trough the night but wake up every 90-100 minutes (baby again): 0 hours recorded
Damn, this is a $500+ device, and it cant even get basic sleep data correctly. Also, it takes anywhere from 1min to couple of hours for data to appear in the Health app.
OTOH my wife has ~3 year old Huawei Fit watch, which was about $120, and that thing records every 10-15min or longer nap. Without a mistake.
It integrates with Health, so it has the bonus of tidying up the sleep data all across the board.
Not related to the developer in any way, just a very happy user.
I've been using it since before WatchOS 7 introduced sleep tracking, and it's scarily accurate even at tracking when I doze off for a short while in bed.
One really valuable thing it has highlighted for me is how much of a negative impact alcohol has on my sleep quality. Very eye-opening. And I would have never known this without AutoSleep.
Installing it right away!
From his latest reviews of the new apple watches, heart rate is pretty much on par with chest strap and sleep tracking is also far better than anything he tested.
Apple Watch : Scientific Sleep Test - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPqtfC70QTUI wear my watch 23/7. It charges in the morning when I’m in the shower.
Only after an extra sporty day with a lot of sports tracking will I need to let it charge an extra 30 minutes or so extra during that day.
I've found if my watch is too loose it won't record sleep well.
It's also a known problem that Apple watches "backup" bugs (which I've experienced twice now). If the problem still continues, I'd recommend you fully unpair/reset your watch and setup it up as a new watch (do not restore from backup).
When I hit the snooze button on my phone and go back to sleep for another hour, both my Garmin and Oura are inconsistent whether that extra hour counts as sleep or not.
Garmin's even weirder than most as it asks you for your normal sleep hours when setting up the watch, which suggests that it's not as smart as it should be.
Garmin, to its credit, is slowly moving away from pure sleep tracking and using other metrics like HRV, stress, and yesterday's activity levels to calculate readiness for today's workout.
Not true. A lot of people with chronic sleep problems (e.g. sleep apnea) feel tired during the day but have no idea why, and don't wake up during the night or have any other direct symptoms that would lead them to have a strong hypothesis for "bad sleep" being the root cause.
> You either know you are getting restful sleep or know you are not...I’d imagine you would feel it, statistics or not.
How I feel doesn't always correlate with good sleep. It's just one variable. Knowing whether my sleep is good lets me know that I should be looking at other problems.
Or, in some cases, I am in bed for eight hours, but the quality of my sleep by the numbers is bad. It's not that I'm not getting enough sleep, it's that something is affecting my sleep. Spicy food too late in the evening? Too much caffeine? Not enough hydration throughout the day? It's hard to be mindful of the things that make my sleep worse unless I actually know when my sleep wasn't great.
I wonder if the dual-band GPS on the Apple Watch Ultra is an attempt to fix these problems? I would guess that it’s software, with the author, if for no other reason than I’d be surprised if Garmin were all that much better at putting GPS in a tiny housing than Apple.
Given Garmin’s long, long history as a manufacturer of (often very small) GPS devices, I personally wouldn’t be.
(I also know for a fact they do mapping better. This summer I was in the South of Italy and only Garmin accurately distinguished between small public roads and long private driveways while both Google and Apple royally messed this up.)
BTW the Fitbit Ionic GPS stopped working and now (if it didn't expire) I will go for the health (battery) recall: https://help.fitbit.com/en_US/ionic.htm and give them to another person. This will be the second replacement since this model stopped working after 1 yr of use and Fitbit sent me a new one.
The author said their watch worked fine in the past. It also works fine after a warm up period, which suggests it’s not getting a GPS lock at the start of the workout.
It’s a new issue of either a software regression, hardware degradation, or RF interference near their start point.
I think the Ultra watches now have an option to wait for a fix before starting (which is what always happens on the Garmin's).
After "you're holding it wrong", anything seems possible. But yeah that does seem more likely to be software, it's a surprisingly difficult and fuzzily-defined problem.
They gave everyone free bumpers, because sweaty fingers would close the antenna gaps. The statement was true, the gaps were placed where they were expected to least affect the grip.
What exactly would you expect in this case?
The messaging worked. If your iPhone 4 was having signal issue, consider readjusting your hand.
Apple sent out free cases to compensate for the issue.
This is not the nightmare scenario that non-iPhone users made it out to be. Apple haters, like any group of haters are a silly bunch.
Most sports watches solve this problem by explicitly telling you your GPS status when you are getting ready to track your exercise.
Like the M1 Air, that version was a huge upgrade from the previous one you could consider almost an LTS release.
Sport gear reviewer DC Rainmaker has a full write up on the good/bad/ugly of the Apple watch for athletes[0]. He also has plenty of other reviews on other brands of sports watches if you want to see what is out there for you.
[0] https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2022/09/apple-watch-ultra-in-dep...
I hear Suunto watches are good too. Basically any company that has been in the GPS space for a long time. Garmin has been doing GPS since long before Apple contemplated making phones.
Solution: Tether with IPhone before leaving until fix is achieved, otherwise keep watch outside or near a window for 10-15 minutes before running so that it can update its almanac from overhead satellites and get a fix.
There is no software solution. Buy a newer watch with cellular connectivity and aGPS-support.
Otherwise, newer OS versions could have degraded the fix algorithm for older Watch-models.
If newer hardware comes with cellular connectivity, newer OS version could assume that by default and not prioritise (or test) backward compatibility with older Watch-models.
And why it couldn't load that data for say month ahead ?
Dc is the gold standard in fitness guides. My interpretation is that if you (like me) want a sports watch, buy a sports watch and not a smart watch with sports features. At least too many deal breakers for me. But they're getting better.
But maybe it changed on iOS 16?
That said, I'm a casual exerciser, not a proper hardcore sportsperson. For those I'd say avoid a lifestyle device like the Apple watch or Fitbit watches - it feels like Garmin supports that niche better.
I'd rather not excercise than have my health data feed the GOOGL advertising engine, thank you. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/google-will-start-as... Because I do not trust them to uphold the EU rules.
1: https://health.gov/sites/default/files/2019-09/Physical_Acti...
But if you have a clear line of sight that's a different issue. I went cycling on a path next to a river and the GPS trace was buttery smooth.
GPS.gov says single band receivers should be able to get less than 2m accuracy. Dual band units, like the latest Garmin Forerunner watches, can do much, much better.
I ended up switching to a Garmin Fenix 7 recently and I'm genuinely happy with it so far. Battery lasts more than 2 weeks and it does 90% of what I was using my Apple Watch for.
This also lowered the avg HR for the workout on the whoop, as you noted. Happy to share an example comparison graph if you’re interested, just reach out.
For what it’s worth, I ended up cancelling the Whoop this month after trying twice to engage with their data team.
Luckily for me I use it mainly to see how long I've been swimming and don't care about other data because it is obviously useless.
Kinda smells like something similar, some aggressive power savings cutting on GPS accuracy or how much app is allowed to run in background.
I tried rebooting, reinstalling the Strava app. Cleaned up some Watch apps. Didn't get better.
Finally I deleted all the watch apps except Strava: apple store, audible, three authenicator apps (why does Authy have a watch app?), my Bank's app (wtf?) etc. etc. etc. Turned off or configured for minimal sync anything I couldn't delete.
Things started tracking again.
Unfortunately, disabling wifi will absolutely wreck havok with getting a quick, precise lock on GPS. Also, the author didn't specify if they have a cellular model or not, which is also a factor.
More importantly, this really is an issue for Apple to fix - let people know what the GPS status is!
IMHO: the apple watch is the BEST casual fitness device. But, if you compete or are training in any serious way, it falls flat almost immediately.
Um, that’s very fast. At my pace (8:45 or 5:26 in km), I barely notice the discrepancies on my Apple Watch 7.
>The measurement errors are so bad, that they overshadow performance differences between runs, and during runs. At the same time Apple keeps adding more and more incorrect stats and graphs, building on top of a shaky foundation. The kilometer splits measured in seconds imply more accuracy than is delivered.
This.
But also, cyclists are less concerned about specific speeds.
What you're saying makes sense, of course. I found some hundreds of meters of discrepancies in some rides (Apple Watch 4 vs. Karoo 2). Less than 1% of the total distance, of course.
> Russia (GLONASS) may intentionally give wrong results in your area. Try switching to just GPS, or GPS & Galileo.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/vo9w0l/comment/ied5...
The only thing that I need to know the accurate distance is to train a specific event, e.g. mile run, 5k, or 10k.
If I train to run a mile within four minutes, all I need to know is to run 60s for each 400m on track.
It’s also nice when you want to do any sort of interval training without actually going to a track.
Having accurate overall distances is less important, but is useful if you’re training for a specific distance and want to run some time trials without using a track or measured course.
I tend to plan my pacing for equal effort, so each lap pace is adjusted for elevation such that in the end the overall pace is just slightly faster than what is needed for goal pace.
Needless to say, I use my Garmin Forerunner 945 for this.
If anyone is running the Seattle Marathon, I'll be there pacing :)
If you're tracking incremental progress than such variability makes the data less useful. But that's why I prefer to use natural landmarks and a stopwatch - the smart watches I've used so far are off to the point where I don't trust them.
Apple support is friendly, but terrible.
Seems like a lawsuit incoming due to "ruined health" by overstating measured activities.
I grant that this is an actual business space, accessorizing and promoting fitness, but these computerized accessories fundamentally distract from the individual's primary goal of getting in shape, leading to reliance on computerized devices that are unnecessary to meeting fitness goals. Isn't there such a thing as tuning one's ability to know one's own limitations naturally? Run. Run hard. Run fast. Run until you can't run any longer, and discover and accept physical limitations and push against them if your drive is unsatisfied.
Is this kind of data gathering really necessary to fitness? I'm nearly certain these applications actually fall under the category of play and entertainment. Maybe watch Rocky (1976) and/or Chariots of Fire (1981) for inspiration. Note the lack of any cybernetics. I'll take a mechanical stopwatch over an Apple Watch running fitness application any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Feel free to use an Apple Watch if it makes you happy, but to accept nothing less than perfection is really quite something else, so maybe there is a different kind of fitness that is immediately more pressing than physical fitness.
"Run. Run hard. Run fast. Run until you can't run any longer, and discover and accept physical limitations and push against them if your drive is unsatisfied"
This is just daft. Eliud Kipchoge, and most other runners very rarely hit their absolute physical limit (during training) and usually only hit it during a race if they did something wrong.
Your VO2 limit is not something you want to slam up against very often and doesn't represent anything other than how fast you can process oxygen directly (at the max point). Much more important to fitness is glycogen use efficiency and cell respiration. You don't improve these elements of your fitness (and they're the ones that count) by "Running fast until you can't run any longer". The opposite infact, you train them by doing long-duration low HR/VO2 activities.
In short, you don't know what you're banging on about, so are hardly in a position to be critical of how other people use digital devices when you don't know the first thing about human physiology in exercise.
"Several days [per week] consisted of 10x440 in 66 seconds with a 2 minute rest. During the following months they were gradually speeded up ... to 59 seconds per 440." [1].
So aside from accuracy, what's the difference between training with the feedback of timed laps on a track (be it Bannister's mechanical stopwatch and cinder track measured in imperial units), or a modern athlete running kilometer repeats on the road via their fancy Apple or Garmin smartwatch?
If one is that much of a running purist, why measure time or distance at all?
One gives useful feedback at a scale that is practical and sufficient and does so at a small cost, the other tracks information at scales beyond what is practical, the true purpose of which is obsession with self or vanity, at a comparatively exponential cost.
Consider that car odometers work on the scale of tenths of miles or kilometers. Exactly what purpose would it serve if they instead displayed distances in micrometers? They would be far more accurate, but that more accurate information is not any more useful than measurements in tenths of miles.
I already stipulated to go ahead and get your Apple Watch, or Garmin or what have you, if it makes you happy. But accumulating data on such absurd scales is not going to improve performance beyond that of using a conventional timer. The problem, as I see it, occurs when nothing less than perfection is acceptable, the entitlement that is exhibited simply because one was foolish enough to pay so much for an unnecessary sports accessory.
