Its limitations made it fall short in daily life but ended up being a plus while trying to disconnect from the world.

On my last day of vacation, I sat on a pristine beach, sipping on a piña colada while staring at a turquoise Caribbean Sea. In four days, I’d charged my Apple Watch Ultra 2 three times, and I was down to about 30 percent. On the other wrist, I had the more modest $249.99 Garmin Lily 2 Sport. It was at about 15 percent, but I hadn’t charged it once. Actually, I’d left the cable hundreds of miles away at home. While pondering this, the Ultra 2 started buzzing. My phone may have been buried under towels and sunscreen bottles at the bottom of a beach bag, but Peloton was having a bad earnings day. The way that watch is set up, there was no way it would let me forget. The Lily 2 also buzzed every now and then. The difference was reading notifications on it was too bothersome and, therefore, easily ignored.

That tiny slice in time sums up everything that makes the Lily 2 great — and perhaps not so great.

My 10 days with the Lily 2 were split into two dramatically different weeks. The first was a chaotic hell spent zipping here and there to get 10,000 things done before vacation. The second, I did my very best to be an untroubled beach potato. That first week, I found the Lily 2 to be cute and comfortable but lacking for my particular needs. On vacation, its limitations meant it was exactly the kind of wearable I needed.

I wasn’t surprised by that. The Lily 2 is not meant to be a mini wrist computer that can occasionally sub in for your phone. It’s meant to look chic, tell you the time, and hey, here’s some basic notifications and fitness tracking. That’s ideal for casual users — the kind of folks who loved fitness bands and Fitbits before Google started mucking around with the formula.

The main thing with the Lily 2 is you have to accept that it’s going to look nice on your wrist but be a little finicky to actually use. The original Lily’s display didn’t register swipes or taps that well. It’s improved a smidge with the Lily 2, but just a smidge. Reading notifications, navigating through menus, and just doing most things on the watch itself I found to be nowhere near as convenient as a more full-fledged touchscreen smartwatch. This extra friction is a big reason why the Lily 2 just didn’t fit my needs in daily life.

As a fitness tracker, the Lily 2 is middling. The main additions this time around are better sleep tracking and a few more activity types, like HIIT, indoor rowing and walking, and meditation. There are also new dance fitness profiles with various subgenres, like Zumba, afrobeat, jazz, line dancing, etc. That said, the Lily 2 isn’t great for monitoring your data mid-workout. Again, fiddly swipes and a small screen add too much friction for that.

I also wouldn’t recommend trying to train for a marathon with the Lily 2. Since it uses your phone’s GPS, my results with outdoor runs were a mixed bag. One four-mile run was recorded as 4.01 miles. Great! Another two-mile run was logged as 2.4 miles. Less great. It’s a tracker best suited to an active life, but not one where the details really matter. Case in point, it was great for tracking my general activity splashing around and floating in the ocean — but it’s not really the tracker I’d reach for if I were trying to track laps in the pool.

At 35mm, it’s a skosh bigger than the original Lily but much smaller than just about every other smartwatch on the market. It’s lighter than most at 24.4g, too. That makes this a supremely comfortable lil watch. Most days, I forgot I was wearing it.

While I’m no fashionista, I didn’t feel like my lilac review unit was hard to slot into my daily wardrobe. But if playful colors aren’t your thing, the Classic version is $30-50 more and has a more elegant feel, a more muted color palette, and nylon / leather straps. (It also adds contactless payments.)

As a woman with a small wrist, the 35mm size is a plus. But while I personally don’t think the Lily 2 has to be a women’s watch, it is undeniably dainty. If you want something with a more neutral vibe or a slightly bigger size, Garmin has the Vivomove Trend or Vivomove Sport. Withings’ ScanWatch 2 or ScanWatch Light are also compelling options.

Ultimately, the Lily 2 is great for folks who want to be more active while trying to cut down on notifications. It’s also a great alternative if you miss the old Misfits, Jawbones, or Fitbit Alta HR. Deep down, I wish that were me, but the reality is I have too much gadget FOMO and care way too much about my running data. That said, the next time I go on vacation — or feel the urge to disconnect — I think I’ll reach for the Lily 2 and try to leave the rest of my life at home.

OnePlus could be a strong alternative to Google or Samsung for Wear OS smartwatches.

At the end of February, a large package arrived on my doorstep. Inside were 11 boxes containing the same version of the $299.99 OnePlus Watch 2. My eyes watered and I whispered, “Not again.”

This was a shipping accident. My box had 10 more watches than I needed for a review. It happens and normally doesn’t hold any larger meaning. But I was nervous because the original OnePlus Watch was by far the worst smartwatch I’ve ever had the misfortune of reviewing. Everything that could go wrong did. The fitness and health tracking deserved the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Troubleshooting the buggy software was a nightmare. That whole abysmal experience was seared into my memory. So when OnePlus reached out to say it was making a second watch — and that this one was markedly better — I was hopeful. And then a box of 11 smartwatches arrived on my doorstep.

Still, it wouldn’t be fair to let past mistakes color my opinions of a new watch. I took my time to get to know the OnePlus Watch 2 on its own merits. So when I say this watch is not only competent but also pretty good, I really mean it.

It works!

The bar for the OnePlus Watch 2 was low. All it had to do was be better than its craptacular predecessor. It’s been a while, so I reread my original review to refresh my memory. To beat the original watch, this one only had to:

• Record reasonably accurate activity and health data. Last time, it recorded 15,314 extra steps compared to a control smartwatch.
• Accurately sync data between the phone and watch. If I took a mile-long walk, it needed to log one mile on my watch and phone. The data for steps, heart rate, distance, etc., had to also match. The last OnePlus Watch continuously gaslit me by showing radically different metrics on the phone versus the wrist.
• View historical sleep data in the app and not just on the wrist. The last one couldn’t do this.
• Deliver push notifications in a timely manner. Not 40 notifications four hours later, all at once.

I’m genuinely chuffed to say wearing the watch these past few weeks was a healing experience. OnePlus did all of that and then some. Whereas the original watch was basically a fitness tracker, this is a genuine smartwatch with a dual-processor architecture, including the latest Wear OS chip and a novel dual OS to prolong battery life.

By upgrading from a proprietary OS to Wear OS 4, the watch delivers a much richer overall experience. I can now access third-party apps from the Play Store. There are multiple music apps to choose from, including Spotify and YouTube Music! There’s contactless payments! I can turn off my smart lights with Google Assistant. That’s huge considering almost no third-party Android smartwatches have launched with Google Assistant since the switch to Wear OS 3. This is the stuff you’d expect from a proper flagship.

Build quality is also better. The original watch was a pretty screen with chintzy, plasticky materials. This has stainless steel and sapphire crystal. The silicone strap is much thicker. The 1.43-inch OLED display is pleasing to look at. Scrolling through screens is smooth, and colors are crisp. I wish screen brightness went above 600 nits — it can look washed out in direct sunlight — but that’s a quibble.

I don’t have any complaints with health, activity, and sleep tracking, either. I wore the OnePlus Watch 2 alongside the Oura Ring, the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music, the Apple Watch Ultra 2, and a few other smart rings. I saw some normal minor discrepancies but nothing to write home about. The OnePlus Watch 2 also adds dual-frequency GPS. It’s a common addition to more premium or rugged smartwatches these days but mostly translates to slightly more accurate GPS data in challenging environments. My results in testing were quite similar to the Ultra 2 and my phone, which both have dual-frequency GPS. Good stuff if you’re the outdoorsy type.

But while these are massive improvements, it’s not perfect. While I liked the addition of a new shortcut button, the “digital crown” isn’t really a crown. It looks like one and spins like one, but it doesn’t actually scroll. It’s functionally a button. The watch, like many newer Wear OS watches, supports Android only. There’s no cellular capability, either, which stinks if you want to leave your phone at home for a run. Likewise, the OnePlus Watch 2 doesn’t have fall detection, EKGs, native period tracking (you could download a third-party app), or body temperature tracking. Most of these omissions aren’t the end of the world if all you want is basic activity tracking. It just means this isn’t a watch where you can comfortably leave your phone at home.

Multiday battery life

The OnePlus Watch 2 has some fancy stuff going on under the hood that translates to excellent battery life. The gist is you’ve got two processors — the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 and the BES2700 MCU. The W5 handles the power-guzzling tasks and runs Wear OS 4. The BES2700 runs background tasks using a proprietary OS. Stuff gets handed off between the two, and the result is long battery life. It helps that there’s a 500mAh battery, too.

How long depends on your usage. If you turn the always-on display off, keep notifications to a minimum, and exercise about 30 minutes with GPS on, you can get several days. The most I got was about four days before a power saving mode kicked on and then about one more day after that mode kicked in. That’s very good and it’s longer than what you’ll get on an Apple, Samsung, or Google smartwatch. With the always-on display turned on, I got closer to 1.5 to two days. That’s standard, though not too shabby.

In power saving mode, the watch loses Wear OS, but you still can receive notifications and track health / activities. OnePlus says you can get around 12 days. I never used the watch in power saving mode only. That sort of defeats the purpose of having a flagship smartwatch, but it’s nice to have if you forget your charger at home.

To get excellent battery life, OnePlus made one big design tradeoff. This watch only comes in a single 47mm size.

That 47mm watch case is why you can stuff in a 500mAh battery. But it bumps the weight to 80g with the strap. I’ve got petite wrists. I felt gravity’s pull on the watch whenever I ran. I really felt it when I wore my leather jacket. The watch was so chunky, I almost didn’t have enough space to pull my wrist through the cuff.

If you’ve got bigger wrists, this won’t be an issue. But there’s no other option for everyone else. That’s a bummer. Most flagship smartwatch makers offer at least a small and big size. They’re making the same tradeoffs — the smaller ones are usually more comfortable, but the bigger ones have better battery life. Consumers understand that, and most are happy to choose the tradeoff that best suits them. Here, that choice has been made for you.

Filling a void

OnePlus has a real opportunity here to take over as the “default alternative.” It’s the first Wear OS 4 watch that isn’t made by Samsung or Google, and it trounces them both in battery life. Unlike its predecessor, it nails the basics. At $300, it’s competitively priced. While there’s room for improvement, it’s well suited for folks who want something stylish without too many bells and whistles.

I actually held onto the 10 extra OnePlus Watch 2 smartwatches during testing. Part of me was afraid that the one I opened would be riddled with bugs. This way, I wouldn’t have to request alternate units. I’d be able to definitively tell if one unit was flawed — or if the watch was yet another unmitigated disaster. But I never needed to open a second watch. Now that my review is done, I can see how silly I was being. This watch is the exact opposite of its predecessor. For once, that’s a good thing.

Correction, April 17th, 2024, 5:08PM ET: A previous version of this review noted the side button wasn’t customizable. It is. We regret the error.

It’s got nothing to do with whether it works. It’s how I’m trapped in TikTok’s neverending product-recommending algorithm.

Every few weeks, I’ll get a sudden deluge of influencers on my For You Page talking about the same product. Sometimes, it’s Lenovo earbuds or a dupe of a Dyson stick vac. Most of the time, it’s skincare products. I’ve managed to resist most temptations thanks to a strict skincare budget — but for about a year, the algorithm won’t stop hounding me about one product: the Medicube Age-R Booster-H.

The Age-R Booster-H is a $330 skincare wand that claims to boost the efficacy of your skincare by using electroporation — short pulses of electricity to create temporary passageways in your skin that help increase absorption. Basically, you zap your face with this thing, your various skincare potions become more effective, and hopefully, you look like a glowy, poreless goddess afterward. Or, at least, this is what the dozens of influencers on my FYP say right after playing a clip of Hailey Bieber using it in her skincare routine.

I’m not naive. I did my homework. The Medicube site lists white papers on studies it’s done of its products and why electroporation might have merit in skincare. But I also know I’m also being sold a narrative by marketing professionals. If you buy this one gadget that Hailey Bieber and all these beautiful influencers have, you, too, will have glowing, radiant skin! I’m aware this leaves out a lot of factors like money, access to dermatological treatments, filters, and genetics. And yet, common sense is often weak against human vanity and 40 percent off Black Friday sales. So I bought one.

I regret it.

I’ve been using this thing to zap my face every day for three months. Sure, my skin looks a little glowy after using it, but skin always looks glowy after applying skincare. “Have I seen any improvement?” I ask myself that in the mirror every morning while I zap myself.

The lack of dramatic, visible results isn’t why I regret buying this thing, though. What bothers me is now I can’t escape my social media algorithms trying to sell me more of the same.

Once you crack and splurge on a gadget you don’t need, your algorithm is never the same. Since buying the Age-R Booster-H, all I see is more Age-R Booster-H content. For the past three months, I’ve gotten more ads for LED light therapy masks, microcurrent facial toner devices, and even facial massage guns. I’ve furiously swiped past all of them, and yet, this morning, I got an ad for the Age-R Booster Pro — Medicube’s latest wand that combines six skincare gadgets in one for $480.

I’m not going to get it. If I did, I’m sure my FYP would become even more of a skincare QVC than it already is. Look, I know this is TikTok working as intended, but I do resent it. It makes me feel even more beholden to the skincare zappy wand. I spent a lot on the thing, so I will be using this until it dies. Knowing all this, it’s frustrating when I find the same marketing tactics creeping into my brain again. Maybe I haven’t seen better results because I don’t use it with the same Medicube collagen cream as the influencers. I already know that results will vary and that OTC skincare can only do so much. Paid influencers also aren’t incentivized to talk about nuance or caveats. Why else am I not seeing more people say the wand was mid or disappointing? I have to yell at myself not to fall into the trap again.

I fell into skincare TikTok because, during the pandemic, applying skincare was a soothing way to wind down after a stressful day. I enjoyed watching nerdy videos about sunscreen filters and listening to cosmetic chemists talk about the efficacy of certain ingredients. I liked how funny people talked about their day while slathering on retinol. The e-commerce aspect was always there, but once upon a time, it felt like a bit more like a friend telling you the product they stumbled upon. Somewhere, something shifted. Now I feel like I’m five again, sitting on the living room floor and watching a lady with a bouffant sell me a neck cream on the home shopping network.

And while I don’t begrudge the influencers a living, I do wonder how I ended up zapping my face with this $330 skincare wand.

For once, I didn’t have to worry about a fiddly fit getting in the way of heart rate tracking.

I was a little skeptical of the $329.95 Sennheiser Momentum Sport earbuds. Other earbuds I’ve tested with heart rate tracking were fiddly. The workout tracking could be well-intentioned but a bit hit-or-miss in practice. So, I was pleasantly surprised that the Momentum Sport buds delivered what was promised — a simple way to view real-time fitness metrics without sacrificing sound quality.

Most fitness buds have extra bass, a more secure fit, and an emphasis on durability. The Momentum Sport have that, plus an optical heart rate sensor and temperature sensor. The pitch here is that the ear is actually a more accurate place to gather this kind of data than the wrist (which is technically true!). It also integrates with the Polar Flow app, giving you access to Polar’s training analytics, voice guidance, and coaching. In some respects, it works a lot like a chest strap... albeit one you can stuff in your ears and that plays music.

As a runner, my checklist for fitness buds is a bit different than everyday buds. They need to stay put in my ears, a good transparency mode is a must, they can’t be crap on windy days, and a lil rain can’t wreck them. The Momentum Sport gets high marks across the board.

Earbud fit is always tricky, but the Sport buds are a solid choice for working out. The buds are on the larger side, and I have smallish ears, so I didn’t find them as comfy as my favorite running buds, the Beats Fit Pro. However, I took them on several runs, and not once did they fall out of my ear.

I’ve had issues in the past with heart rate tracking earbuds because of fit. Good contact with the sensor is crucial, so a bad fit could mean getting wonky results — or none at all. It negates the whole point of in-ear metric tracking: better accuracy. I didn’t have that problem here. That makes this a neat alternative if you practice some sports that aren’t conducive to smartwatches or find chest straps uncomfortable, especially if you like working out to music — you can theoretically wear one less wearable to get your data.

Transparency and the Anti-Wind modes were great on my outdoor runs. I could still easily hear cars whizzing around me, but strong gusts didn’t drown out my tunes. I also took them on a miserable, rainy run with no issue. That said, I’d still check the weather before runs. These are IP55, a bit better than the typical IPX4 you see on buds, but a torrential thunderstorm could be a bad time.

For fitness tracking, I dug that you’re not limited to a proprietary companion app. If you’re in Polar’s ecosystem, it fully integrates with the Polar Vantage V3 watch. Without a Polar watch, you can also link the Sennheiser Smart Control app with the Polar Flow app on your phone. Then, all you do is launch a workout from Polar Flow and select it as your heart rate sensor of choice. It worked well when I tried it, and if you don’t have a fitness app you like, Polar Flow is a pretty comprehensive one! The downside is you’re not going to be wearing these all day, so your recovery insights aren’t going to be quite as good.

It also works with other fitness apps and smartwatches that support Bluetooth accessories. I checked and was able to pair it with Strava and Runkeeper — two of my more frequently used fitness apps. I also paired it to my Apple Watch Ultra 2 and was able to view my heart rate metrics from there as well. I appreciate it because it lets me go get my training guidance from the platform of my choice. When I tested the Amazfit Powerbuds Pro, a similar pair of fitness tracking buds, I had to use its proprietary companion app to get access to a lot of health features. That just added more clutter to my routine.

As for accuracy, it was within roughly 5 beats per minute of the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music paired with the HRM-Fit chest strap. Body temperature was more of a head-scratcher. For starters, it’s hard to test accuracy. It’s a safety hazard to run with a thermometer sticking out of my ear, and other wearables focus more on changes in skin temperature overnight. But I get why high-level athletes might value body temperature data. It’s just that for the average person, it’s overkill. You’ll get warmer when you work out. You’ll also probably notice when you start to overheat without needing to know your exact body temp.

On my everyday headphones, sound quality is the thing I care about most. With fitness buds, great sound quality is more of a bonus. I’ll tolerate a bit of tinniness so long as my K-pop anthems can get me through a run. Not an issue here! I’ve been running to a lot of Stray Kids lately and the thumpy, percussive MEGAVERSE sounds great on these buds. While the buds have great bass, the rest of it sounds great, too.

Battery-wise, you get about six hours of playback — that’s good enough for the average long run or race. The case holds an additional three full charges, and in normal usage, that should get you a good long while. I’ve been using these as my daily workout and commute headphones for the past two weeks. My case still has about 40 percent battery left.

One thing I didn’t love was the touch controls. You can customize them in the Smart Control app, but I found them too easy to activate while I was adjusting fit. This was despite the fact that I adjusted tap sensitivity lower. Still, having them is better than not during cold weather workouts when you’re wearing gloves.

At $330, these are expensive, but you are technically getting a chest strap and headphones in one. My Beats Fit Pro were about $180 on sale, plus I currently use the $150 Garmin HRM-Fit as a chest strap. (Though you can get chest straps for about $80-$100.) That’s about the same cost.

In the past, my issue with fitness tracking earbuds was that they didn’t make my life easier. The finicky fit meant it took longer to get going. I didn’t want any additional training features from buds when I was already using other fitness apps. The Sennheiser Momentum Sport aren’t promising too much — just good sound and an alternative way to measure your heart rate. That’s all I want from fitness buds.

Finally, a chest strap that works with my sports bra — not against it.

Sports bras are a necessary evil. I’m not the bustiest runner, but even I need a high-support bra to neutralize the laws of physics. Adding a chest strap to the mix, however, often feels like I’ve signed up to run 13 miles with a python squeezing my chest. Which is why the $149.99 Garmin HRM-Fit chest strap is a stroke of genius.

To get why the HRM-Fit is so great, you need to understand how regular chest straps fail sports bra wearers. Traditional chest straps are typically an elastic loop that wraps around your entire body with electrodes on the underside. Because the electrodes need to maintain good contact with your skin, you have to tighten the loop such that it doesn’t slip. Stick that under a medium- or high-support sports bra — which is already pretty constrictive — and it’s a bad time. Add underboob sweat to the mix, and keeping my Polar H10 clean is a whole job.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

It might not seem like a huge change, but the HRM-Fit doesn’t wrap fully around your chest. Instead, there are three clips that latch onto your sports bra band. There are also two electrodes on the underside. I cannot overemphasize how enjoyable the HRM-Fit was to use because of that simple design change.

The clips make it so there’s no additional pressure. I often forgot I was even wearing it. Conversely, I’m always acutely aware of my Polar H10. Also, with the HRM-Fit, cleaning the strap is easy because underboob sweat wasn’t as much of an issue because there isn’t a ton of fabric touching my skin. I went from dreading putting on my chest strap to not minding it at all.

Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

I’m all for a chest strap that doesn’t ask people with tatas to sacrifice any comfort, especially since chest straps help people who either can’t use smartwatches or for whom smartwatches aren’t the best option. (Have you tried putting a boxing glove over a smartwatch? Not fun.) Plus, they’re more accurate than optical heart rate sensors since they actually measure your heartbeat via electrical signals instead of light reflected off your skin. That makes them great picks for people with tattoos and more melanated skin.

That said, it’s not perfect. Because it latches onto your bra, you need the right kind of sports bra. Garmin has a little guide, but it works best if you have a bra with a medium-width band. I found that if the band was too narrow, the HRM-Fit wouldn’t lay flat. That ruled out a few of my favorite sports bras. Another bummer is that it’s not recommended with front-zip sports bras. It can also be tricky if you use sports bras with underwires. I was lucky that the HRM-Fit mostly worked with the majority of my sports bras, especially since replacing them would be so damn expensive. But depending on your sports bra preferences, the HRM-Fit may not be compatible.

I also wish the HRM-Fit were easier to use outside of Garmin’s platform. It’s super simple if you’re using it with a Garmin watch. But it’s not quite as easy to view real-time data if you’d rather use the HRM-Fit with a third-party smartwatch or on its own. Say you go for a run without a Garmin watch. The strap will record metrics like steps, calories, intensity minutes, and heart rate — but it won’t record that data as part of a run. Conversely, Polar’s chest straps work with the separate Polar Beat app that can record timed activities, even if you don’t have a Polar watch.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

This is less of a problem if you plan to use this with gym equipment or fitness apps that support third-party accessories. It has Bluetooth and ANT Plus, so you can view data on a machine in real time. Meanwhile, if you pair to connected machines like Peloton Bikes and fitness apps, you’ll at least get to see your HRM-Fit recorded data within that app’s workout summary. In the Garmin Connect app, you can only view it as part of your overall daily data unless you’re using it with another Garmin device.

I also don’t love that, at $150, this is much more expensive than the Polar H10 or Wahoo’s various Tickr chest straps. Those you can easily find for under $100, especially during the holidays. It’s the pink tax. Not only do you have to buy a sports bra but you also have to pay more to use a chest strap that works comfortably with them. But even with all my quibbles, I’m stoked that the HRM-Fit exists. Finally, someone in the fitness tech space has acknowledged that chest straps can — and should — be designed differently for people who wear bras.

The tradeoffs are well worth the savings over the slightly more advanced Forerunner 265.

If you’re training for a race, few multisport watch brands do it like Garmin. But there are two things I don’t like about ‘em. They’re pricey, and the platform can be intimidating to newcomers. Have you seen its online store? For newbies, it’s tough to parse which of Garmin’s dozens of watches gets you the basics without destroying your wallet. Not anymore. After spending the last few weeks with the $299.99 Forerunner 165 Music, I’m convinced this — or the $249.99 standard version — is the Garmin watch that hits the sweet spot.

Three hundred smackeroos may not seem budget-friendly until you look at Garmin’s flagship watches. Those can go for a whopping $700 to well over $1,000. Even midrange watches, like the excellent Forerunner 265 series, retail for $450. I loved the Forerunner 265 series. The only thing I didn’t like was the price. And that’s what makes this particular watch so appealing. It’s a near clone of the smaller 265S but for $150 to $200 less. The only things you’re really missing are dual-frequency GPS and some sports profiles. (And like the Forerunner 265 series it’s also missing EKGs for atrial fibrillation.)

Seriously. Side by side, it’s hard to tell my 165 Music and 265S apart. The buttons on the 265S are a bit fancier. Thankfully, my units are different colors. I don’t think I’d be able to tell at a glance otherwise.

As for performance, in 95 percent of my daily use, I didn’t notice a difference. Even without dual-frequency GPS, you still get accurate outdoor activity tracking. I tested the 165 Music simultaneously with my phone and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 — both of which have dual-frequency GPS. The maps and distance reported all corresponded within a 10th of a mile. I might’ve seen more of a difference if I ran in a challenging environment, like Manhattan’s financial district. That said, I’ve done a lot of running with multisport watches with and without dual-frequency GPS. While dual-frequency GPS is more accurate, it mostly benefits folks who train in GPS dead zones. If that’s not you, you won’t likely notice.

For activity profiles and health tracking metrics, you get the basics for a training watch. And Garmin’s definition of basic is generous. Are you going to get snowboarding or boxing? No. More niche activities like triathlon, golfing, mountain biking, or team sports require a more expensive Forerunner or Garmin. But if you generally stick to the gym, cycling, running, swimming, hiking, tennis (or pickleball!), and the occasional yoga or pilates session? You’re good. Sure, spending more will get you more — but this will get most people everything they need.

Heart rate data was also on par with my Ultra 2 and a Polar H10 chest strap. Since I’m not someone with a high risk of AFib, I never even missed the EKG feature. (Even if I were, EKG-powered AFib features aren’t a diagnostic tool and still require you to see a doctor.) Unless it runs in your family or you know you’re at risk, EKGs just aren’t a feature everyone needs, especially since high / low heart rate notifications are still available.

Aside from these few things, you’re getting everything that makes a Garmin a Garmin: long battery life, durability, and a ton of training data. Even with a more power-hungry OLED display, the 165 Music lasted me almost a week on a single charge with the always-on display enabled and closer to 10 days with it off. The 165 Music survived my cat chomping on it, and it’s more than capable of handling a dunk in the pool. You can still access Garmin Coach, adaptive training plans, nap detection, sleep tracking, and features like Body Battery and Morning Report. And, blessedly, the redesigned Garmin Connect app has decluttered a lot of that information, making it easier to glance at.

Normally, I’d launch into a TED Talk about why Garmin’s cluttered product lineup needs fewer watches. That said, the Forerunner 165 stands out because the price, feature set, and product design are all so well aligned. Garmin’s been missing a good training watch in the sub-$300 category, where most of its options are like the Venu Sq 2 or Vivomove Trend — they’re either geared toward casual users or people looking for a more stylish vibe. This is a bona fide training watch, both in terms of design and function.

The only bad thing about the 165 series is it further muddies the already-crowded Forerunner lineup. Lord knows Garmin has a Forerunner 55, 255, 265, 745, 955, 965, and a handful of others I’m missing. There’s even other watch lines, like the Instinct, that are quite similar to the Forerunner. But amid all the clutter, the Forerunner 165 and 165 Music are my picks for an entry-level Garmin for training. It’s great for newbies to the platform — as well as intermediate and advanced athletes who aren’t interested in bells and whistles.

Update, April 1st, 2024, 9:12AM ET: Updated comparisons to clarify that the 265 series does not have EKG.

There are a lot of ideas and promise packed into this smart ring, but it’s not all the way there yet.

In the run-up to CES 2022, I was chatting with Movano CEO John Mastrototaro about his big, ambitious idea for a smart ring that would one day monitor chronic illnesses. The renders showcased a sleek and slim ring with an open gap up top. It would be designed with women in mind. Accuracy would be paramount, and eventually, the ring would have FDA clearance as a medical device. It was an impressive pitch. It would just have to make it off the show floor.

A little over two years later, I now have Movano’s $269 Evie Ring on my finger. It’s not quite as slim as that original design, that FDA clearance is still pending, and it’s not really about monitoring chronic illnesses. But it is a working smart ring that you can buy — the start of a comeback in a dwindling field.

For the longest time, I’ve been waiting for something that could give the Oura Ring a run for its money. The Evie Ring isn’t quite that just yet, but I’m hopeful that one day it could be.

Clever design

Compared to smartwatches, smart rings are smaller, lighter, more discreet, more comfortable for sleep tracking, and more accurate for heart rate measurements. But there’s one major flaw: your fingers swell. I dread my Oura Ring running out of battery because every time I take it off, I risk dislocating a knuckle. In the summer, I often have no choice but to run my hand under cold water to get the ring free.

That’s never happened with the Evie Ring. To be clear, I’ve been bloated many times while testing this ring. It doesn’t matter. I can always comfortably take it off.

It’s not witchcraft — it’s the design. The ring’s signature gap not only looks chic but also functionally gives the ring extra flex. You can put on a few pounds and not think about whether you have to buy another smart ring. That’s clutch, as I’ve yet to see any smart rings that come in half sizes or offer ways to adjust sizing if your body changes. (The Evie Ring is available in sizes 5 to 12.) It’s a small thing, but it dramatically improves comfort — and with wearables, comfort is king.

It’s also hardy enough to survive showers, dishwashing, and a dunk in the pool. I would, however, consider taking it off for weight lifting. After about a month, mine has a few deep scratches on the underside. Nothing super noticeable at a glance, but it’s worse than scuffs I have on the Oura Ring.

Battery life is one of the most challenging aspects of smart ring design. A fully round ring requires a flexible battery that’s small enough to wear while still powering all the essentials. The Evie Ring adds another engineering hurdle with the open gap, so it’s encouraging to see battery life is decent. I get about four or five days on a single charge. While that’s not mind-blowing for the category, the charging case is another excellent touch. It holds up to 10 charges, the ring attaches magnetically to a groove inside, and crucially, it’s safely enclosed within. I can stick it in my purse or on my nightstand without worrying about the ring falling out.

A holistic health tracker

In Movano’s original pitch, the Evie Ring would combine accuracy with a streamlined app that makes sense of what all your health data actually means. Right now, I’d say the Evie Ring gives you a taste of that but not the whole meal.

Take the app’s design. It’s fresh, playful, and emphasizes holistic health. Instead of asking you to close a bunch of rings, the main tab displays your daily health factors as a single ring. It reminds me of a more stylish pie chart, and it’s a refreshing visualization of how things like sleep, active minutes, steps, and calories burned all play a part in your overall health. It’s also good that the app acknowledges there are only so many goals you should chase at once. You’re limited to three at a given time, which helps you stay focused and sustainably build new habits.

Accuracy-wise, everything except sleep tracking (more on that below) was in line with what I got on my Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Oura Ring. You can keep an eye on your heart rate trends, menstrual cycle, and overall activity and workouts. Sleep tracking has its own tab where the data is divided into sleep stages and metrics like resting heart rate, heart rate variability, SpO2, respiration rate, and skin temperature variation. In the journal, you can track your cycle and the various symptoms and moods that occur — or you could just choose to track your emotions sans your period.

This is fairly typical but lacks some of that extra context I was hoping for. Is it nice that the Evie Ring tracks my temperature? I guess. But I can’t view my temperature history over time or see how it relates to my cycle. There are blurbs as to why certain data points matter but not as many insights as to what my data’s telling me. In all fairness, this is a problem with most fitness tracking platforms. I’m calling it out here because contextualization was supposed to be something that set Evie apart.

First-gen quirks

While the Evie Ring is a refreshing take on smart rings and health trackers, it’s still a first-gen device. And like any first-gen gadget, it has kinks to iron out.

My biggest issue was syncing. I’d open the Evie app first thing in the morning, and it’d take a few minutes for it to sync with my phone. In 2024, that’s four or five whole K-pop TikToks I could’ve scrolled through before dragging myself out of bed. Thanks to some firmware updates, it’s gotten a lot better over the last week, but if I don’t sync first thing in the morning, it sometimes doesn’t register my sleep from the previous night. That’s despite the fact that the ring can store up to seven days of data between syncs.

Sleep tracking accuracy has also been a mixed bag. While the duration usually corresponds with my Oura Ring and my myriad sleep trackers, it repeatedly reports a much shorter amount of deep sleep. One weekend, I zonked out for 10 whole hours. It reported maybe an hour of deep sleep.

So far, the Evie Ring is also iOS only. That’s not uncommon — I’ve seen plenty of other health tech companies prioritize iOS first and then come out with an Android version later. It’s just a bummer.

A good start

I dig a lot about the Evie Ring — particularly the design. It’s more comfortable thanks to the gap, charging it is more convenient, and overall, it’s delivering a similar experience to the Oura Ring. And it’s doing it for less money and no monthly subscription.

But we’ll have to see whether Movano’s gambles on FDA clearance and its medical prowess help it stick out from the crowd. It’s about to get real competitive in the smart ring space. RingConn, Circular, and Ultrahuman are already out here chipping away at Oura’s dominance. Amazfit, which makes a ton of excellent budget smartwatches, is coming out with a fitness-focused smart ring later this year. The big doozy is Samsung’s forthcoming Galaxy Ring. Samsung is a big name, and if it succeeds here, it’s a matter of time before other tech giants follow. I have to imagine that even Oura is feeling the pressure, let alone a smaller company like Movano.

Even so, I’m rooting for the Evie Ring to stick it out. The thoughtful design has been refreshing, and it’s got a solid foundation here. I just hope it gets the chance to build on it.

These watches hit a nice balance between style and function without bombarding you with information.

These days, there’s been an uptick in people asking me about simple yet stylish smartwatches. Emphasis on simple. Begone fancy health and training features! Stuff the third-party apps! All they want is a device that looks nice, has bare-bones tracking, and doesn’t need frequent charging. Everything else — the Apple Watches, the Samsung Galaxy Watches, the Pixel Watches — comes with too many bells and whistles. Inevitably, the daily charging gets old, and these expensive watches end up collecting dust in a drawer.

If that’s you, the $349.95 Withings ScanWatch 2 or the $249.95 ScanWatch Light is worth a gander.

Get ready for compliments

When I wore these outside, I got stopped a lot by friends, family, co-workers, and the occasional stranger. “That looks really nice,” they all said. “Where did you get it?” That rarely happens.

Hybrid smartwatches like these are essentially dressier, incognito versions of yesteryear’s fitness bands stuffed inside an analog watch. Recently, on Threads, I saw a spirited discourse about whether you should wear an Apple Watch to a fancy dinner. Well, if you wore one to a wedding, only the eagle-eyed would notice that it’s a smartwatch.

The ScanWatch 2 is elegant, while the Light is sporty. A lot of it boils down to color and materials. The ScanWatch 2 has sapphire crystal and an extra dial for tracking step goal progress. It also opts for neutral colors like Withings’ classic white or black faces. (There’s also a fetching navy option.) The Light opts for Gorilla glass and comes in a fun minty green or a pale blue in addition to the black and white versions. Both have stainless steel cases in either silver or rose gold, with plenty of strap options. Outside of design, the ScanWatch 2 has more sensors and health tracking features, while the Light is a pared-down version that’s $100 cheaper.

I’d describe my style as “aggressively casual,” but neither watch stuck out like a sore thumb with plaids, band T-shirts, and jeans. Both were also easy to dress up for occasions when I had to look like a put-together adult.

I have small wrists, but the 37mm Light was just the right size — and comically tiny whenever I’d compare it to the 49mm Apple Watch Ultra 2 on my other arm. The 38mm ScanWatch 2 was similar in feel, though that also comes in a larger 42mm model. These are on the smaller side for smartwatches, so if you want something bigger, they might not fit the bill.

Bare-bones basics for the tech-fatigued

These are for the folks who say a watch is for telling the frickin’ time... and maybe one or two other things.

That’s because neither watch conveys information, aside from the time, particularly well. All you get is a tiny grayscale OLED display. If you want to read a notification, you have to wait for it to slowly scroll through. Since there’s no touchscreen, you have to use the digital crown to scroll through menus and press it to select something. I’ll put up with it to start a workout, but I’m less inclined to do it for timers or EKG readings. It’s much less tedious than the Fossil Gen 6 Hybrid’s interface, but most days, it was easier to think of this as a regular watch.

As with older fitness bands, this is most useful for triaging notifications and passively tracking basic metrics. “Oh, what’s this buzz? Brad emailed. Brad can wait.” (You can also choose which apps ping you.) Besides, you’ll need to pull out your phone to take calls or view your data anyway.

That can be good! If you want to be more present, going low-tech can be a useful tool. Navigating menus on the ScanWatch is tedious, which means I’m less likely to get distracted by a message.

Because its only screen is tiny and grayscale, the battery lasts weeks at a time. If you’re mostly using this as an analog watch, those gains multiply. Seriously, I wore each for weeks. Withings estimates you get about 30 days on a single charge, though I got around 21 to 25 due to heavier usage for testing. I took the ScanWatch 2 on a weeklong business trip, left the charger at home, and it was all good.

The only problem is you might lose the charger because you rarely need it. When I moved, the ScanWatch 2’s charger disappeared into the same interdimensional portal that gobbles up all my left socks. You can buy replacements, but unlike other gadgets, all smartwatch makers have their own proprietary chargers. That means replacements can get pricey ($24.95, in this case). And the two watches don’t even use the same proprietary charger. I tried seeing if the Light’s charger would work, but it doesn’t. So if you and a family member both use Withings but have different watches, you won’t be able to share.

Big-picture health tracking

The ScanWatch 2 tracks more data than the Light. In addition to a new temperature sensor, it measures blood oxygen levels and elevation. It also supports atrial fibrillation detection via EKG readings. The Light skips all of that in favor of shaving off $100 from the price.

Otherwise, these are similar in function. Both support features like heart rate monitoring and high / low heart rate notifications. GPS tracking for the watches is done through your phone, and both are safe for swims with a 5ATM water resistance rating. And now, in the year 2024, Withings has added period tracking!

Accuracy — including GPS tracking — was decent, but you’re not getting Garmin levels of insight. On my walks and runs, the distances logged were in line with my Ultra 2. I didn’t notice any major discrepancies in my workout or resting heart rates with either watch. Sleep tracking was okay at giving an overall picture, but I found the Oura Ring more accurately reflected nightly interruptions like my cat Pablo waking me up for kibble at 4AM. If you stick to casual activities, these will get the job done.

Withings’ app is more tailored toward educated wellness than training, which again, is great if all you need are the basics. The app has a clean, minimalist design that’s easy to navigate and is chock-full of educational reading. I just hate the giant notification cards up top. They’re well-intentioned, often including tips on how to use the watch and reminders to hit your goals. But they pile up, aren’t easy to dismiss, and get old after a while. You have the option of subscribing to Withings Plus, but casual users don’t really need the extras it provides. As for data syncing, Withings works with Apple’s and Google’s health APIs and with Strava.

Which should you get? It depends on whether you want all the health features or the Light’s lower price. Personally, I’d save the extra $100. The temperature sensor doesn’t tie in with cycle tracking, and it’s mostly for monitoring your baseline at rest, while sleeping, and during workouts. It’s neat for data nerds, but it doesn’t take a genius to know you’re warmer during intense exercise. SpO2 tracking in consumer wearables also isn’t that useful yet.

Pleasantly retro

It was refreshing to test a smartwatch that does less. Wearing the Ultra 2 side by side with the ScanWatch 2 or the ScanWatch Light, I got to see firsthand how many notifications I get every day and how peaceful it can be when you’re more intentional with what gets your attention.

But Apple and Google aren’t likely to suddenly change course. Every year, the watches get a little bigger, a little smarter, and a little more packed with new sensors. For better or worse, smartwatches continue to do more, even if plenty of folks would like them to do less. Samsung is changing things up a little with the forthcoming Galaxy Ring — but even that seems to be a bid to build out its ecosystem. (And maybe entice you to get a Samsung watch or phone while you’re at it.)

Withings has an opportunity here to keep things simple. There’s a gap in the stylish-but-uncomplicated tracker space. Garmin hybrids are nice, but Garmins are famous for data overload. Smart rings are having a moment, but they’re not ideal if you want some notification capabilities. The Googlefication of Fitbit is messy as hell. With fitness bands going the way of the dodo, you could do a lot worse than a Withings watch.

I know what I saw, but I’m still trying to figure out where this headset fits in real life.

It’s a slushy, snowy day in New York City — the kind where I’d normally look out the window and declare a work-from-home day. But today, I hauled myself out into the wet cold because Apple had offered Nilay Patel and me demo time with the Apple Vision Pro.

Nilay and a few others have already spent time with the Vision Pro, but for everyone else, the $3,499 Vision Pro has been shrouded in mystery. But my half-hour with it revealed that Apple’s headset felt more familiar than I thought it would. The iPhone face scan to select the correct light seal is very similar to setting up Face ID. Slipping it onto your head isn’t that different from any number of other VR headsets, like the Meta Quest line — the design and fabric headband are just more Apple-y. And like any other VR headset, you feel it sitting on your head and wrecking your hairdo once you slip it on. (If you’ve got long hair like me, you’ll feel it bunch up in the back, too.)

Photo: Apple

After the headset is situated, there’s a brief setup for eye tracking — look at various dots and tap your fingers together — and then visionOS drops you into the app launcher, which looks a lot like Launchpad on a Mac. The only difference is you can still see the room around you, if you so choose. On the upper right-hand side, there’s a digital crown — something I’m well acquainted with as an Apple Watch user. You use it to recenter your homescreen or immerse yourself in a virtual environment. The opposite side has a button for taking spatial photos and video. This, too, looks like the side button on an Apple Watch.

As in previous demos, vision tracking was fast and accurate. Looking at a menu item or button immediately highlighted it. Movie titles highlighted in the Apple TV app as my eyes roved over them. Apple had us open the virtual keyboard in Safari to browse to a website, and it worked, albeit clunkily: you look at a letter and pinch your fingers to select it. You can type as fast as your eyes can move and fingers can pinch, which means it’s much easier to dictate to Siri.

I had a little trouble with the pinch and double-pinch gestures at first because I was apparently holding the pinches too long when trying to select. It wasn’t until I was told to lightly tap and let go — the same action as double tap on the Apple Watch — that it all started to click.

The demo we received was similar to what Nilay got to experience at WWDC, with a few additions here and there. Even so, reading about Nilay’s experience a few months ago and then actually getting to see it myself were two very different things. I’ve read how bonkers the screen is. But even knowing that, my eyes weren’t really prepared for two 4K screens blasting 23-micron pixels into each eyeball. I had to remind myself to blink lest my eyes dry out.

The virtual world inside the Vision Pro feels like a higher-resolution version of what Meta is trying to accomplish with the Quest but with a vastly more powerful M2-based computer to use inside. It’s neat that I can throw an app over to my upper right so I can look up at the ceiling and view photos if I want. It’s fun to rip the tires off an AR Alfa Romeo F1 car in JigSpace. There is a certain novelty to opening up the Disney Plus app to watch a Star Wars trailer in a virtual environment that looks like Tatooine. I did, in fact, flinch when a T. rex made eye contact with me. A virtual environment of the Haleakalā volcano surprised me because the texture of the rocks looked quite lifelike. This is all familiar stuff. It’s just done well, and done with no lag whatsoever.

Photo: Apple

Apple had us bring some of our own spatial videos and panoramic photos to look at inside the Vision Pro, and the effect was convincing, although it works best when the camera is held still. Nilay had shot some spatial videos where he’d intentionally moved the camera to follow his kid around the zoo and felt some familiar VR motion queasiness. Apple says it’s doing everything it can to reduce that, but it’s clear some shots will work better in spatial than others — like any other camera system, really. We’ll have to keep playing with this outside of Apple’s carefully controlled environment to really figure out its limits.

Apple keeps emphasizing that the Vision Pro isn’t meant to isolate you from the rest of the world, and the display on the front of the headset is designed to keep you connected to others. So we got to see a demo of EyeSight — what an onlooker would see on that front display when looking at someone wearing the Vision Pro. It’s a bit goofy, but you can see the wearer’s eyes, part of what Apple calls a “persona.” (We were not able to set up our own personas, sadly.) When Apple’s Vision Pro demo person blinked, we saw a virtual version of their eyes blink. When they were looking at an app, a bluish light appeared to indicate their attention was elsewhere. And when they went into a full virtual environment, the screen turned into an opaque shimmer. If you started talking to them while they were watching a movie, their virtual ghost eyes would appear before you. And when they took a spatial photo, you’d see the screen flash like a shutter.

This is all well and good, but it’s strange to wear the headset and not actually know what’s happening on that front display — to not really have a sense of your appearance. And it’s even stranger that looking at people in the real world can cause them to appear, apparition-like, in the virtual world. The social cues of this thing are going to take a long while to sort out. Admittedly, it was all a whirlwind. I spent a half-hour like a kid gawping at an alien planet — even though I’d never left the couch. But by the end of my demo, I started to feel the weight of the headset bring me back to the real world. I’d been furrowing my brow, concentrating so hard, I felt the beginnings of a mild headache. That tension dissipated as soon as I took the headset off, but walking back out into Manhattan, I kept replaying the demo over in my head. I know what I just saw. I’m just still trying to see where it fits in the real world.

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I felt like a Kardashian reject roaming the streets of New York City, but hey, Alexa could tell me the weather.

The purpose of the Amazon Echo Frames is obvious: to provide quick access to Alexa no matter where you are because it’s on your face. But generally speaking, that’s not why anyone wants smart glasses, let alone a pair that costs $389.99 like the Carrera Cruiser model I’ve been wearing for the past week.

For better or worse, most people’s vision of smart glasses is informed by Tony Stark, James Bond, and other iconic sci-fi and spy movie characters: sleek, discreet devices that have some sort of hidden mixed reality display or the ability to capture the world around you. The original Google Glass cemented that image, while successors like the Snap Spectacles and the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses have leaned heavily into content creation. But the Echo Frames hasn’t really ever been quite that ambitious. Like the Bose Frames, Amazon’s approach to smart glasses has primarily been as a pair of open-ear headphones that you can take calls on, listen to music with, and ask the occasional Alexa query. There’s no camera, no screen, and nothing to clue anyone in that you’re not just wearing ordinary glasses.

Amazon isn’t straying too far from that formula with these third-gen Echo Frames. The big thing now is that they’re lighter, the battery lasts longer, the bass is more bassy, and they look a lot more stylish than previous iterations. I don’t think that’s enough to turn the Echo Frames into a must-have gadget — but it’s a half-step in the right direction.

Strike a pose

It’s a big deal that Amazon’s latest Echo Frames look nicer than before. Style is one of the most underrated criteria for smart glasses, and put simply, you’re just not going to wear something that makes you look like a dweeb. Everyone’s face and vision is different, and a successful pair of smart glasses is going to account for that by offering a wide range of styles, colors, and fits.

With the third-gen Echo Frames, you can choose between clear, prescription, blue light filtering, and sunglass lenses. They also come in multiple shapes, including round, cat eye, square, rectangle, and “modern” rectangle. These start at $269.99 for the most basic clear lenses, $299.99 for blue light filtering lenses, and $329.99 for sunglasses.

These are all subtler options, but if you like a flashier style, Amazon is also continuing its partnership with Carrera. That extra pizzazz comes with a heftier price tag. The Cruiser (the one I have) and Sprinter model will both set you back $389.99. The latter is more of a boxy, Wayfarer-esque frame and gives you the option of sunglass or blue light filtering lenses.

Because the Cruiser only comes with sunglass lenses, I wore these during my commute and on outdoor walks. They are a vibe. I’ve been described as channeling Yeezy, a Kardashian reject, a card-carrying member of the Jersey Shore mafia, and a time traveler from the ’80s. I most definitely have turned heads while on the street. I had fun wearing these, and most folks could pull this off so long as they put a little swagger in their step — but personally, this isn’t the style I’d pick for my day-to-day sunnies, mostly because they didn’t fit my face well. While these are made of a lightweight acetate weighing 46.3g, I have a low nose bridge, and these were slipping down my face every five seconds. The other thing I didn’t love about the Cruiser glasses was the build quality. While they look high fashion, they feel plasticky in my hands and not befitting of their nearly $400 price tag.

Forget the bass

As I said, these are less smart glasses than they are a pair of open-ear headphones. On that front, the Echo Frames are alright for the category but are nothing mind-blowing.

Bass is purportedly three times better on the new Echo Frames, but they’re still not going to bring the thump of even standard AirPods. I’ve been listening to a lot of Stray Kids lately, and Felix’s TikTok-breaking rumbly baritone is absolutely lost on these. In God’s Menu, the song’s famous “cookin’ like a chef I’m a 5-star Michelin” line is reduced to zero-star Michelin. On a loud train, I couldn’t even hear it despite turning the volume up to the max.

This isn’t a problem limited to the Echo Frames — it’s a common problem with any open-ear audio headphones. That said, the same song on the Meta smart glasses sounded a bit richer. These were a lot better for podcasts or less bass-heavy songs, but you still can’t get away from the feeling like you’re listening to something from a few feet away instead of right next to your ear.

At the same time, there’s a fair amount of audio leakage. No one asked me to turn things down while I was commuting. Trains and city noises are loud. But at the same volume in the office, all of my co-workers could hear that I was listening to something. They might not have been able to discern the song, but it was loud enough to be distracting.

As for call quality, these were good enough. I called a friend during an hour-long walk, and she was able to hear me despite beeping trucks and wind. In her words, I sounded “echo-y,” and she could hear a lot of the ambient noise around me, but at no point was she unable to hear me. I do like that you can pair the glasses to multiple devices and have them switch between the two — that’s something the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses weren’t really capable of. However, this is only useful if you’re getting clear glasses, as you shouldn’t be wearing sunglasses indoors while on your laptop.

The controls are at least easy to navigate. On the left arm, you’ve got a self-explanatory volume rocker. (Though, I found myself reaching for the volume rocker on my phone far more often. Habits are hard to break, especially if you often have your phone in hand anyway.) On the right side, there are two action buttons that you can use to take or decline calls, put the device into pairing mode, or mute Alexa. If you press the back action button twice, you can launch a personalized playlist on the music streaming service of your choice. For me, I’d think that’d be a list full of K-pop and sad indie artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski. Instead, the glasses played a list full of artists I didn’t know and songs that I would never listen to.

Like I said, these are more headphones than smart glasses.

Alexa on your face

The main thing that’s supposed to set the Echo Frames apart is the fact that they have Alexa built in. My problem here is that Alexa has never been and still isn’t a particularly good voice assistant when you’re on the go. It’s fine at answering odd queries, setting timers, and telling you the weather — but it’s much better at controlling your smart home than replacing Siri or Assistant.

It’s not that you can’t do things. You can now use this to make non-Alexa calls and, if you have an Android phone, reply to text messages. Directions are also possible, but it’s clunky. Alexa told me I’d get a notification on my phone to start... but that meant tweaking my notification settings to a less preferred option. When I did get it working, it suggested I go to Bowling Green in Kentucky instead of the Manhattan train station five minutes away. Most things are still just easier (and faster) on my phone. As a result, I didn’t have a lot of reasons to actually use Alexa on these glasses. That was only exacerbated by the fact that I had a pair of sunglasses instead of regular glasses.

It relies on your phone for a connection, and that’s a pro and a con. So long as you have a stable Bluetooth connection and your phone has signal, you can use Alexa reliably while on the go. On the flip side, you don’t have much offline usability on that front. Plus, you need to make sure the Alexa app is always open and running in the background.

Even so, it’s just weird to say “Alexa” in public. (You can change the wake word to Echo if that feels better, but for me, it did not.) This is an issue I have with nearly every pair of smart glasses with some kind of voice assistant. Earbuds are a visual and cultural signal that we all implicitly understand. If I’m talking to midair with AirPods in, you can be confident I’m on a call. Me talking to myself with no phone or AirPods in sight got me some odd looks from strangers — and confused looks from some of my friends.

In terms of notifications, I like that you have some control over when you get notified. There’s a VIP Filter you can curate so that only select apps and contacts will notify you. The glasses will play a sound whenever you get a notification, and then you can pull your phone out to check. It won’t read your texts, but I appreciate that. I don’t love it when Siri takes 10 years to read out the URL to a funny link my friends send me, for instance. It does mean you have to be ruthless when setting up your VIP list, however.

For testing purposes, I did try issuing a few Alexa commands while I had these at home. I was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t trip up any of my Echo speakers. There is a feature where you can ask any Echo speaker you have to locate your Frames. That’s nice, but at the same time, I doubt it’s something most people will frequently use. As a lifelong glasses wearer, mine are always either in a case or on my nightstand because. I have a specific drawer for sunglasses. Plus, this feature relies on your glasses having a decent charge.

Speaking of charge, these held up well over the past week. My commute is around 60–80 minutes, depending how much the MTA wants to test me. I’ve gotten about five hours of media playback and calls thus far and have about 30 percent battery left. Meanwhile, a roughly 50-minute call drained the battery about 20 percent. Charging from zero to 100 percent takes about 2.5 hours, though I’m not a big fan of the charging stand’s design. It took me a hot second to figure out that you’re supposed to place them on the stand vertically so that the lenses are pointed straight up at the ceiling. The way the stand is designed, I’d expected you’d plop them in horizontally. I missed the charging case of Meta’s smart glasses, which killed two birds with one stone and was a much more elegant charging solution overall.

Pay more for less

If you’re a heavy Alexa user, I can see paying the $270 for the base model and maybe using FSA or HSA funds if you need prescription lenses. But while I like the look of the Carrera Cruiser model, this is not nearly $400 worth of tech and style, especially not when the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses start at $299 — a mere $30 more than the cheapest Echo Frames. Those get you better build quality, a surprisingly good hands-free camera for photos and video, the ability to livestream to Instagram, better audio quality, and a much better mic. Those get you the option of transition lenses, too, though the third-gen Echo Frames are at least on a similar playing field when it comes to style. Likewise, the Bose Frames Tempo and Soprano have a retail price of $249 — and can be found on sale for around $200. Those have similar battery life and better sound quality.

These make some small moves in the right direction. Again, improving the range of available styles was a much-needed change. It’s good to beef up the audio, but it wasn’t enough of a change to make these stand above the competition or a compelling alternative to wireless earbuds. But perhaps most crucially, I wasn’t convinced to use Alexa more than I otherwise would have. As it stands, I think Amazon’s getting there with form. It’s just not quite there with function.

While the Venu 3 series ticks off a lot of the right boxes, it’s a little pricey considering the competition. But at least you’ll finally get credit for your naps.

You can expect three things from a Garmin: long battery life, durability, and more fitness data than is strictly necessary. All that is true of the $449.99 Venu 3S. But compared to the company’s beefy multisport watches this is, technically speaking, Garmin’s most smartwatch-like watch.

That’s not a high bar to clear, but there’s a lot to like here. There are new heart rate sensors which support EKG readings for atrial fibrillation detection. Garmin has also added a more advanced sleep coach and, finally, nap detection. On the wellness front, it includes audio meditation sessions. And like the Venu 2 Plus, it also has a mic and speaker so you can use your phone’s voice assistant. The Venu 3 series is also the first to introduce a wheelchair mode. There are several design tweaks and some more premium features that have trickled down to the Venu 3 series — all of which add up to a better overall experience from its predecessors.

If this were about $100 cheaper, I’d say Garmin’s rivals (cough Fitbit cough) should be nervous. As it stands, I’m having a hard time getting over the price — even if it checks off a lot of the right boxes.

Long lasting, sporty chic

A few years back, every Garmin leaned heavily on rugged, chunky design sensibilities and black or neon colors. The few chic options available were exorbitantly priced with a so-so feature set. So I’m pleased that the Venu 3 series is a nice mix of affordability, fun styling, and comfort.

The Venu 3 series comes in two sizes: the 41mm Venu 3S and the 45mm Venu 3. I’ve got smaller wrists, so I opted for the 3S. My review unit has a gold stainless steel bezel with a pinkish-purple case and strap. It’s fresh and fun without being too garish. Sometimes with more colorful watches, you have to make a tradeoff for more formal events. You don’t really have to do that here. I was able to wear this to some business events, and there are more muted color options that still have a fashionable flair. The 1.2-inch OLED display is crisp, and you have a decent selection of watchfaces and complications to choose from.

The 3S is also slim and comfy to wear, measuring 12mm thick and weighing 40g with the strap. I tested this watch throughout the fall and had zero issues with the case catching on my various jacket sleeves. I never had the urge to rip it off in the middle of the night either.

This isn’t the hardiest Garmin, but that’s fine as it’s clearly aimed at more casual-to-intermediate users. I’m not particularly gentle with my devices and this thing survived multiple bouts against my kitten’s fangs. I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re partaking in extreme sports or prone to whacking your devices against door jambs, but you’re fine for everyday workouts.

Battery life was also on par with what I expected. The 3S gets nine to 10 days on a single charge the always-on display disabled. With it on, that’ll drop to around four to six days, depending on your usage. (I generally do 30 to 60 minutes of daily GPS activity on the highest GNSS settings when testing, with all notifications enabled.)

More wellness than smarts

Garmin watches are good, but they’re more similar to Fitbits than the Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch when it comes to smarts. They’re fitness trackers that have some smart features, and the Venu 3S has more than most Garmins.

The main thing that makes the Venu 3 series smart is the ability to take calls from the wrist and interact with your phone’s voice assistant over Bluetooth. This was introduced on the Venu 2 Plus a few years back, but it’s still not something you’ll find in Garmin’s product lineup outside these three watches. It all works well. Calls sound clear, and it comes in handy even if the watch itself doesn’t have LTE. I also think it’s the right move for a platform-agnostic wearable to use your phone’s voice assistant. It’s a lot more practical than Amazon Alexa, which is what Fossil watches, Fitbits, and some other budget trackers have opted for in the past.

Otherwise, the smart features are fairly basic. You get the typical alarms, timers, calendar, and weather. It also supports contactless payments via Garmin Pay. But like every other Garmin watch, the third-party app ecosystem is paltry. You’ve got Spotify for offline playlists, but the Garmin Connect IQ store isn’t anywhere close to what the Apple App Store or Google Play Store has to offer. Garmin has a bunch of third-party integrations with outdoorsy apps like Strava and Komoot, but it’s not quite the same thing.

Where the watch shines is in its mix of wellness features. Particularly with regard to sleep tracking — an area where Garmin has tended to lag behind the competition.

Sleep Coach is a new feature that contextualizes your sleep data by factoring in your nightly heart rate variability (new to the Venu 3 series), age, activity history, and any naps you might have taken. That’s a big deal, since so much of Garmin’s platform centers around training and your body’s physical readiness to take on more strain. In my experience, Garmin’s so-so sleep tracking would occasionally muck up those recovery metrics — especially since before the Venu 3 series, Garmin devices couldn’t even account for your naps!

It’s baffling that Garmin had omitted nap detection for so long, so I’m glad it’s here now. I take a lot of naps during the busy tech review season, and for the most part, the 3S did a good job of catching when I snuck in some extra Zzz’s. I wouldn’t say it was perfect. There were a few times where it was a little off in terms of duration compared to my Oura Ring Gen 3. But overall, it was good enough and I felt more confident in my recovery and training load metrics.

On the wrist, you also get more detailed metrics than before. It’s not a drastic change, but it does make Garmin’s data easier to visually digest.

Outside of sleep tracking, the Venu 3 series also introduces audio guided meditation sessions. I’m generally not a fan of these kinds of features, but it’s well done. You can choose a mantra that you stick into your phone, audio tracks, and an overall theme while watching a guided visual on the wrist. It’s a good use of the OLED display and microphone. I also dig that it tracks your heart rate, respiration rate, and how that impacts your overall bodily stress. Oura and Fitbit offer similar features on their devices, and it’s nice for skeptical folks like me to see how meditation sessions impact your metrics. (That said, I’m still not likely to use this feature frequently.)

It’s also encouraging to see that Garmin recently expanded the number of devices that now support its EKG and atrial fibrillation feature. I tried it on the Venu 3S, and I was unsurprised to see that it detected no signs of AFib. That said, if you’re in good shape and have no known risk factors, this isn’t a must-have feature. As for heart rate accuracy, I found that it was accurate to within about 5 bpm of my Polar H10 chest strap during workouts.

Another neat little update: the Venu 3S now supports multiple GNSS systems instead of just GPS. It’s not the more accurate dual-frequency GPS you’ll find on the Fenix 7, 7 Pro, or second-gen Epix watches, but it’s a step up. That said, I did have some wonkiness in my GPS results early on in testing where the Venu 3S was about a tenth of a mile off from my Apple Watch Ultra and phone. That’s not a huge problem for casual users or at shorter distances like a 5K or 10K. It’s more of a thing to keep in mind if you primarily run longer distances, like half marathons or marathons. For folks who prioritize GPS, I’d consider the Forerunner 265 instead as it’s the same price but comes with dual-frequency GPS.

Those are what I find to be the most meaningful updates. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that despite this being a lifestyle Garmin, this has a buttload of training features, too. You get Garmin Coach, which offers free and downloadable training plans for running and cycling. You get Body Battery, which is Garmin’s metric for visualizing how much energy you have on a given day. You can broadcast your HR to various gym equipment, view HR zones, get recovery time estimates, and view on-screen muscle maps for strength workouts. It’s not as expansive as the top-of-the-line Garmins, but it’s much more comprehensive than what you’ll find on a Fitbit.

A pricier Fitbit alternative

The only thing I don’t like about the Venu 3S is that it’s $450. The cellular 41mm Apple Watch Series 9 is the same price, while the LTE versions of the Google Pixel Watch 2 and 40mm Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 cost $400 and $270, respectively. The non-LTE versions of all three watches can be had for less. Meanwhile, the Venu 3S doesn’t have the capability for LTE, so its main advantages are battery life and fitness tracking. And with fitness tracking, these competing flagships deliver a good-enough experience for the casual users at whom this particular Garmin is aimed.

The otherwise excellent Venu 3S is also a victim of Garmin’s bloated product lineup. I’ve said it countless times, but Garmin could stand to prune its offerings so that its products aren’t competing with each other. Like I said earlier, the Forerunner 265 is a very similar product that costs the same, and there are a handful of other lifestyle Garmins that cost much less that would also appeal to potential Venu 3 users.

So who is this for? Garmins are generally a better fit for disgruntled Fitbit users. The feature set and battery life are similar, as is the overall focus on fitness over smarts. The price disparity can just be tough to swallow. The Fitbit Sense 2, for instance, is the priciest Fitbit, has a similar feature set, slightly better smarts, and you can often find it on sale for around $250. Garmin’s main advantage here is better build quality, no Google or server shenanigans, and no paywalled features.

It boils down to what type of Garmin you want to invest in. For most athletes looking for a cheaper Garmin, the Forerunner watches are likely a better use of your money. This is for the Garmin users who want an itty bitty bit more smart functionality from their device — and don’t mind paying a premium for it.

Google’s fingerprints are all over this casual fitness tracker.

Fitbit, what are you doing?

That’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the past year as Google has further integrated the company into the fold. In the past 11 months, Fitbit has had several major server outages, angered longtime users by sunsetting Challenges and social features, and then quietly stopped selling its products in over a dozen countries. Those are the highlights in what’s been a bumpy integration, so I was heartened when Google announced the $159.95 Fitbit Charge 6 earlier this fall.

The Charge 6 seemed like a return to form. It’s $20 cheaper than the Charge 5, with a better heart rate tracking algorithm, more Google services, and — for the first time — gym equipment integration. The Fitbit app was redesigned this fall. These are all good and fine, but the change I cared about most was the return of the side button. Fitbit did away with the side button on the Charge 3 in favor of an inductive groove, and let’s just say it wasn’t a popular choice.

I regret to say that while the button is back, it’s not quite what I was hoping for. But once my ire cooled, it became more apparent just how much more of Google is in this device — to the point where I’ve started calling this the Pixel Band in my head.

Side button side-eye

The Charge 6 looks nearly identical to the Charge 5. The only visual cue that this is a different tracker is the new side button.

When the Charge 6 was first announced, I thought it would have a physical side button. So did a lot of other folks. So I felt bamboozled and betrayed when I unboxed the tracker. Yes, it looks like a button, with its oblong shape and tactile bump, but when you press, nothing moves. There is no click. If you do it right, you’ll feel a buzz. Because this is a haptic button — not a mechanical one.

I get why. Fitbit’s physical buttons have never been as reliable as Garmin’s. They often got stuck as the years went by. Why invite the hardware headache if the haptic button works just as well? But that’s a big gamble in this space.

With wearables, physical buttons are beloved for a reason. They signal that you’ve got a wearable that works even when your fingers are sweaty or in gloves. Most of the time, they also double as shortcuts for frequently used apps. It’s freedom from the touchscreen, if that’s what you want (though most people like having both). Plus, some people just like pressing buttons.

This quasi-button has thus far been more reliable than the groove and less prone to accidental presses. Pressing once will either wake up the device or bring you back to the main watchface; pressing twice brings up Google Wallet. During activities, it brings you to the pause button at the bottom of your workout data. Functionally, it works, but as a card-carrying member of Team Physical Button, I’m a bit disappointed.

While the haptic button works, it’s not as easy to press with a single finger. It requires a good amount more pressure to activate than the physical buttons on my Garmins. I wore the Charge 6 on my left hand and tried to use my right pointer finger to press the button. I didn’t succeed in activating the button, but I did push the entire tracker up my wrist. It was easier on the right side, but this is the type of thing mechanical buttons do better. More often than not, I ended up needing to use my thumb and index finger to squeeze the sides of the case in order to get the button to press. My main concern here is folks with limited hand dexterity or mobility might have issues depending on where the button is placed. I’d feel better if you could swap watchface and button orientation, like you can on some smartwatches, but that’s not an option.

For most people, this is just something they can get used to. But if you ask me, instead of this haptic business, Fitbit and Google should just get good at making physical buttons.

A casual fitness tracker

Fitness and health tracking are what Fitbit does best, and that’s where the Charge 6 shines. It’s also where it feels most like a Fitbit device. Overall, it’s similar to the Charge 5 in that this is best for casual users who want to be more active.

GPS tracking still isn’t as good as a Garmin. In my testing, the Charge 6 tended to overreport runs by as much as a tenth of a mile compared to my Apple Watch Ultra 2 and iPhone 14 Pro Max, both of which include the more accurate dual-frequency GPS. That’s fairly typical for this category, but it’s a thing long-distance runners should keep in mind when tacking on more mileage. It also takes a bit to find a GPS signal. As for heart rate, everything was on par with my Ultra 2 and Polar H10. I find it lags a bit when I switch up paces, but nothing too egregious.

For health tracking, it’s all the usual staples — Active Zone Minutes, sleep tracking, nightly SpO2 readings, EKGs, and EDA scans. But there is a new ability to broadcast your heart rate to fitness equipment. It’s a long overdue addition, but your mileage may vary. Fitbit says it’s only guaranteed to work with the latest models of iFit, NordicTrack, Concept2, Peloton, and Tonal machines. That said, it’s possible it may work with machines that support Bluetooth accessories. So if you have an older machine at home, or at your local gym, this may not replace what you’ve got already. I tried this at my gym, which primarily uses Life Fitness machines, and it was a no-go. While the machines were able to connect with the Charge 6, they couldn’t maintain the connection and my heart rate never showed up on-screen. In any case, this is a nice to have, and Fitbit says it’s working on extending compatibility over time.

Battery life is also good with the always-on display off. I averaged about a week with multiple GPS walks and runs, sleep tracking, SpO2 tracking, and notifications on. With the always-on display enabled, you’re looking at more like two days. This has been the case for a while now with Fitbit trackers, but it is a little disappointing that we haven’t seen much progress in AODs.

Redesigned app

Google’s fingerprints are all over the Charge 6’s software. For starters, legacy Fitbit users must migrate their data to a Google Account to use the device — same as the Pixel Watch 2. New users will have to log in with a personal Google Account. (Workspace accounts aren’t supported.) While the deadline to migrate isn’t until 2025, Google’s been prompting folks to make the switch since earlier this summer.

The Fitbit app redesign also borrows much of its streamlined look from Material You. It has some benefits over the old design, but so far it doesn’t seem to have stuck the landing with longtime Fitbit users. There’s also no dark mode and when the redesign first rolled out, it angered many Fitbit users by eliminating step streaks and rearranging the way data was presented. Some also have criticized the minimalist design for being less readable. Personally, I’ve gotten a bit more used to the new design after also testing the Pixel Watch 2. It’s easier to read than Garmin’s Connect app, but I agree it’s not as glanceable as before.

Google has since re-added step streaks and even brought the previously iOS-only feature over to Android. Just this week, it’s also added goal celebrations and the ability to customize your Focus with specific metrics instead of just selecting from presets. Last but not least, battery percentages have been added back in the Today tab and to the “Devices Connected to Fitbit” menu.

It’s a good thing that Google is willing to listen to user feedback. But as with many things related to the Google-Fitbit integration, this was yet another scenario that could’ve been easily avoided.

Subscription fatigue

Outside of health tracking, the Charge 6 has a better app selection than the 5 in that it has any outside of basic notifications and health tracking. Still, this is Google’s party and the three apps you’re getting are Google Maps, YouTube Music, and Google Wallet. RIP Fitbit Pay.

This is good and bad. Good because we’re getting more apps again after third-party apps like Deezer, Spotify, and Starbucks vanished from last year’s Sense 2 and Versa 4. Bad because the Charge 6 only comes with a one-month trial of YouTube Music and no other way to play music if you don’t want to pony up for the $11 monthly subscription thereafter. If you tack on Fitbit Premium ($10 monthly, $80 annually), you’re looking at possibly spending $15 to $21 a month to get the full experience. We all get why Google locks you out of other music services on the Charge 6 — to push you toward its own. It’s irksome nevertheless.

Some might argue that’s not a ton, compared to the price of a Peloton All-Access membership or Whoop’s $30 monthly subscription. But anecdotally, I don’t know many athletes who only have one fitness subscription or who use YouTube Music as their primary streaming service. Adding another monthly fee to the mix for the privilege of music control — it doesn’t feel great. It’s better than nothing, but only just.

Don’t expect anything too fancy out of Google Wallet or Google Maps, either. For starters, you don’t have a lot of screen space to work with, so these are very utilitarian. I used Google Maps for a couple of walks around the neighborhood. (It also supports cycling and driving directions.) It gets the job done, but it’s still easier to pull out your phone. Especially since you have to start directions on your phone anyway. I can see this being more useful for cyclists. Likewise, Google Wallet is similarly utilitarian. It’s a pain when it prompts you to enter your PIN code because you have to do a LOT of scrolling, but you don’t have to do it every time. Google Wallet, however, is a much more expansive network than Fitbit Pay ever was, so this is still a step up.

The Google-fication of Fitbit

Despite my gripes, I’m glad the Charge 6 exists. There’s been a definite shift toward smartwatches over the last two years and not a ton of options for folks who want simpler trackers. It’s nice to see a new fitness band from a bigger, established brand.

However, $160 is on the pricier side for a fitness band, especially when you factor in the subscription costs. Plus, there are lots of cheaper trackers with huge feature sets like the $50 Amazfit Band 7. If you find the Charge 6 on sale for about $100, however, that’s a pretty good bargain. On the flip side, paying $120 to $150 more gets you an Apple Watch SE or a Samsung Galaxy Watch 6.

But aside from price, for the Charge 6 to make sense, you have be willing to bet that Google’s vision for wearables can succeed. So far, I’ve seen mixed signals. On the one hand, Google continues to invest in wearables, making small updates throughout the year. Its ongoing efforts in this Fitbit integration are also proof of that. As I mentioned earlier, Google did go back and address feedback about the redesign. At the same time, massive server outages aren’t a joke and every so often, I have to wonder about unforced errors like eliminating Challenges and Step Streaks.

A part of me feels nostalgic for the Fitbit of old, but the Google-fication of Fitbit is only going to continue. I’ve started to make peace with that. Have you?

This laptop is undoubtedly fast, powerful, and earns the Pro moniker. It’ll also cost you a pretty penny.

Hello again. It’s only been about 10 months since the M2 Pro and Max chips arrived on the MacBook Pros, but that’s already old news. Here I am with the MacBook Pro 16 with the M3 Max chip — and hoo boy, this is one big, beefy hunk of Pro laptop. It’s priced like one, too.

If this bad boy and its benchmarks came out in 2021, we’d all be picking our jaws up off the floor. But it’s 2023, and we’ve already seen what Apple Silicon can do. Spec bumps just aren’t as tantalizing as whole transitions. And while this computer is powerful, it starts at $3,499. That’s for the “base” M3 Max configuration with a 14-core CPU, 30-core GPU, 36GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage. That’s about as much as my current rent is for a two-bedroom New York City apartment.

The review unit that Apple sent me? It’s got a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 128GB of memory, and 8TB of storage. It delivers ludicrous speed at a ludicrous price of $7,199. You can get the same CPU and GPU performance but with less extreme amounts of RAM and storage starting around $4,000. And while I’m focusing on the M3 Max version here, if all you want is the 16-inch chassis and can give up the extreme performance, Apple sells versions with the less powerful M3 Pro chip starting at $2,500.

I cannot fathom paying this much of my own money for a laptop. I suspect most people reading this are the same way. But since I have this one handy, let’s talk about what it’s like to actually use one as your daily driver.

What is space black?

Unlike the new entry-level M3 MacBook Pro 14, there’s nearly nothing to dissect in terms of design. The chassis for the 16-inch remains the same as the 2021 and early 2023 models: same keyboard, same gorgeous display (though in SDR mode, it can now go up to 600 nits, 20 percent brighter than before), same camera, same trackpad, and the same ports. (Unlike the base 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro, there are no shenanigans with the Thunderbolt ports or external displays, and there better not be for this price.)

What is new design-wise is the space black color option. Black is a powerful color that exudes modernity, elegance, and cool. There’s a reason New Yorkers, Batman, and the fashion industry are known for wearing a lot of it. However, this laptop does not resemble the dark void of space. Space black is to black as the iPhone 14 Pro Max’s deep purple is to purple. Its darkness and color are often determined by what’s around it. Next to my space gray MacBook Pro 14, it looks black. Depending on the lighting, I’d argue that my midnight MacBook Air 15 is more black and appears darker, even if there’s an obvious blue tint. Next to my leather jacket, space black looks like charcoal gray.

Apple did do a good job of making it less smudgy. It uses a new technique in the anodization process so your greasy mitts don’t leave as much of a mark. But smudge-proof it isn’t. After a week, I can definitely see the fingerprints on the cover and where my palms rest while typing. It’s nowhere near as bad as my midnight MacBook Air, however, and I hope Apple brings this to future midnight Airs, too.

As whelmed as I am by the color, I can’t deny it has a mysterious allure. When a co-worker heard I was testing these, they asked to FaceTime as I unboxed the space black model. Another ran over for a firsthand look when I brought it to the office. They, too, were merely whelmed, but their initial curiosity wasn’t nothing.

Ludicrous speed

Alright nerds, behold the benchmark chart.

It’s hard to stress this machine out. I wish I had this level of cucumber-cool when processing stressful situations. The only time it felt like this laptop had to work was when gaming on high settings. The fans wheezed loudest when running Shadow of the Tomb Raider on its highest settings, right as the benchmark test briefly pushed the machine to around 200fps. It was similar, albeit a smidge quieter, with Lies of P, which runs natively on Apple Silicon, unlike Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Our 4K export test and PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro simulate video editing workloads, and the M3 Max smoked ’em. The former wrapped up in 90 seconds flat, more than twice as fast as the M3. Meanwhile, the PugetBench test generally takes around 15 or 20 minutes. I ran it four times, and this machine did it in an average of seven minutes, a smidge faster than it took the M2 Max to complete it.

The main differences between the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips are in the number of CPU and GPU cores and the ratio of performance to efficiency CPU cores. Apple sent me the top-of-the-line M3 Max model, with 16 CPU cores (12 performance, four efficiency) and 40 GPU cores — plus a ludicrous 128GB of RAM and 8TB SSD. I compared it to the M3 MacBook Pro 14 with eight CPU cores (four performance, four efficiency) and 10 GPU cores as well as the M2 Max MacBook Pro 16 with 12 CPU cores (eight performance, four efficiency) and 38 GPU cores.

For single-core CPU benchmarks, the M3 and M3 Max were about on par and about 10 to 15 percent faster than an M2 core. On multi-core benchmarks, the M3 Max sometimes scales pretty linearly. Take Cinebench 2024’s multi-core test: with 12 performance cores, the M3 Max is nearly three times as fast as the M3 with four performance cores and about 60 percent faster than the M2 Max with eight.

GPU performance is a bit less straightforward. On Geekbench 6, M3 GPU cores do about as well as M2 ones. In Cinebench 2024, on the other hand, the M3 GPU was over twice as fast per core as the M2, probably because the benchmark was updated to take advantage of the M3 GPU’s new capabilities, like ray tracing. It looks like there’s a lot of potential for further GPU gains once apps are updated to take advantage of them.

The M3 Max in this computer has four times as many GPU cores as the M3 in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, and sometimes it’s four times faster, like in Tomb Raider. In Geekbench, it’s around three times faster in OpenCL mode and a bit more than that in Metal.

I ran a lot of these benchmarks simultaneously with the M3 14. It’ll surprise no one that I saw a noticeable difference. But was the difference so vast that it made a difference to my workload? No, but I’m also not the target market for this laptop.

Sites, unsurprisingly, load lightning-fast. This thing is so silent, sometimes I felt the urge to poke it just to make sure it was still on. Getting the battery to die is annoying. I have yet to take the 16 off high-power mode, and it has the audacity to go for about 18 hours in my testing.

Let me put it this way. I started one workday at about 8:30AM with about 49 percent battery. I used it unplugged, at about 200 nits brightness, for the entire work day, closing it only to stuff it into my backpack. At 5:40PM, when I opened the laptop to work on my ferry ride home, it had 23 percent battery still remaining. It still had 20 percent when I disembarked about 30 minutes later, and enough for about two hours of futzing around online after that. I didn’t have to plug it in until I woke up the laptop the next morning.

Battery rundown tests — and all benchmark tests, really — aren’t always reflective of real-life usage, especially as efficiency gets better and better. We all know batteries degrade over time, and I’m testing the most intensive scenarios. In real life, most people are going to use power-saving features, close a laptop’s lid when not in use, or allow the display to go to sleep. I would not at all be surprised if you could get 24 hours with a typical office productivity workload.

If you’re new to the 16-inch model, have a think about what you’re giving up in exchange for the performance. It’s technically portable, but this is more of a desktop alternative than a laptop. At a cafe, this took up nearly the entire width of a table, leaving little room for lunch. It only just fit into my backpack’s laptop sleeve. This behemoth is 4.7 pounds, and I felt it during an hour-long commute where I didn’t get a seat on the train. The benefit is that the big display is easy to work on, especially if, like me, your terrible eyesight requires you to blow up your font to 125 percent. That, plus ProMotion and HDR brightness make for an enjoyable experience when watching videos.

The gaming elephant in the room

The M3 Max is 100 percent technologically capable of Gaming with a capital G. That doesn’t make this a fully viable gaming laptop. Take the three Apple Silicon native games that Apple offered to reviewers: Baldur’s Gate 3; Lies of P; and Disney Dreamlight Valley.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the most notable title of the three. It’s buzzy, people want to play it, and the fact it’s available on Mac is a step in the right direction. While mentioning Lies of P, all but one co-worker asked, “Lies of who?” I’m also confident no gamer is getting an M3 Max to play Disney Dreamlight Valley.

To be clear, all three games were extremely playable — gorgeous even — on this machine. In Lies of P (turns out P is a reimagined goth Pinocchio), I was able to turn on all the highest graphics settings, and gameplay was smooth as I hacked and slashed my way through some animatronic soldiers in a steampunk dystopia. Baldur’s Gate 3 tested my tolerance for textures, as mind-flayer parasites slithering in eyeballs and dragon spittle in the opening cutscenes looked... disturbingly gloopy. (Skin and hair looked great, though.) For both of these games, I could hear the fans whirring, but the keyboard never got particularly hot — just toasty enough that it became an alluring napping spot for my kitten. Disney Dreamlight Valley is much less taxing, and the fans never once kicked on.

On Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which is an older game that works on the Mac via Rosetta 2, I saw about four times the frame rate on the M3 Max versus the M3. The game is certainly playable on the M3, but you’re going to have a lot better time on the M3 Max (and be able to better take advantage of the MacBook Pro’s 120Hz ProMotion display). The frame rate was about 16 percent better than on the M2 Max with two fewer GPU cores.

But the hardware was never the issue. Out of curiosity, I browsed through the selection of Mac games on Steam, and the pickings are still paltry. It was better than a few years ago, but Disco Elysium is not a game that requires a $4,000-plus laptop. Neither are Stardew Valley or Football Manager 2024. If you peruse this Apple gaming wiki, you’ll be able to scroll through the entire list of native Apple games in a few swipes. The list of Rosetta-enabled games is longer... and mostly full of older titles. There are alternative cloud gaming options like Parallels or Air GPU, but they’re still not as good or as easy as Boot Camp for Intel Macs was.

To be a true gaming laptop, the MacBook Pro needs to match consoles and gaming PCs in terms of library. Having a handful of AAA titles ain’t good enough because gamers are not a monolith.

Take my spouse. They have zero interest in Baldur’s Gate 3 but desperately wish they could play racing games like Gran Turismo 7, Forza Motorsport, and iRacing on their M2 Max MacBook Pro. GT7 is console-only at the moment, Forza is only on console and PC, and iRacing is PC-exclusive. By having a console or a gaming PC, they can play two out of three of these games. If all they had were a Mac, that number would be zero. The racing games that are available on Macs are Asphalt 8 and Asphalt 9, games that are commonly played on an iPhone.

There’s some hope for the future. Earlier this year, Apple announced a new Game Porting Toolkit that’s similar to what Valve’s done with Proton and the Steam Deck. It’s not the final deal, but it’s another step in the right direction. The bottom line is Apple has the hardware — it just now needs the games.

What is all this power for?

If you’re not a creative with an intense workload or a gamer with infinite patience, a MacBook Pro with an M3 Max configuration is obviously overkill. If benchmarking my spouse’s M2 Max MacBook Pro 16 proved anything, it’s that you don’t need the best configuration to get very similar results. Even so, I suspect M1 Pro and Max owners know they don’t need to upgrade.

I’m not saying I was unimpressed by this beast of a laptop. I’m only saying that, at the end of the day, this is a relatively modest performance bump for most tasks. For some folks, that might mean the more economical option is to snag a discounted M2 Pro or Max machine while they’re still available.

Otherwise, this laptop is for a specific type of person: the kind of pro with workloads who can save a lot of time overall by shaving off a few minutes here and there. For those folks, the price is less of an issue because this is probably a business expense that can be written off.

For the rest of us, it’s a chance to look vicariously at the progress Apple Silicon has made and see how it stacks up against competitors like Intel and AMD. It’s maybe not the most exciting thing, but you can think of it as helping you make smarter choices down the road.

The long-awaited replacement for the 13-inch MacBook Pro is here, and it’s exactly as expected. But the line between Air and Pro users is blurrier than ever.

Goodbye, 13-inch MacBook Pro. I will not miss your cramped screen and Touch Bar. Hello, 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro, the new entry-level Pro on the block.

In many ways, this MacBook is my “what could’ve been.” Earlier this year, fed up with waiting for a larger iMac, I threw up my hands and traded in my personal laptop, a 13-inch Intel-powered MacBook Pro, for the 15-inch M2 MacBook Air. (Because, if you have the means, you should keep work and personal machines separate.) I briefly considered copping a 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro, but I was not keen to continue living that Touch Bar life and wanted a bigger display. The 14-inch had the M2 Pro chip, which was more chip than I needed for more dollars than I wanted to spend. In that context, the 15-inch made the most sense for my home setup.

If this 14-inch MacBook Pro had been around, I would have been a lot more conflicted.

Ports, design, and the lack of space black

The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,599 with the new M3 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. For this review, Apple sent me a step-up configuration with the same M3 processor, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage, which bumps the price to $1,999.

This is just the base M3 chip — Apple also sells a 14-inch MacBook Pro with the beefier M3 Pro and M3 Max. The M3 Pro models also start at $1,999, while the Max starts at an eye-watering $3,199. On top of more powerful chips, those models will get you more (and faster) Thunderbolt ports, higher storage options, and more memory — starting at 18GB for the Pro (up to 36GB) or 36GB (up to 128GB) for the Max. Configurations can be a headache to sift through, but any way you slice it, it’s annoying that Apple’s base M3 starts so underpowered with just 8GB of RAM. And yes, I will get into why 8GB of unified memory is not enough.

Design-wise, there’s nothing to really write home about. If you’re a longtime MacBook follower, you know what to expect. The display is pretty, the touchpad works great, there sure is a notch, but you get used to it, and typing has been enjoyable ever since Apple did away with the butterfly switches a few years ago. The 1080p webcam makes you look like a human and not a potato on calls. Basically, it’s exactly what I’d want out of a MacBook Pro and includes all the good updates from the last few years. It’s still annoying that Apple doesn’t let you upgrade individual parts, but at this point, do we expect different from Apple?

But while I enjoyed using the 14-inch Pro overall, there was one thing that really irked me: ports.

Since the move to Apple Silicon, the MacBook Pro has generally had three Thunderbolt ports, a headphone jack, MagSafe 3 port, an SDXC slot, and an HDMI port. The base model 14-inch Pro with M3 processor only has two Thunderbolt 3 ports. That third port — and Thunderbolt 4 — are reserved for the M3 Pro and M3 Max models.

On the one hand, this is still a step up from the now-discontinued 13-inch and both Air models — all of which only have two Thunderbolt ports, a headphone jack, and nothing else. On the other hand, why?

Why is Apple gatekeeping that third Thunderbolt port to the M3 Pro and M3 Max? You could argue that’s because the M3 chip only supports a single external display, while the M3 Pro and Max chips support two. (Another feature Apple gatekeeps.) The third Thunderbolt port is sandwiched between the HDMI and SDXC slot of the M3 Pro and M3 Max models, so I suppose it’s the one Apple thinks you’ll use for external monitors. It still feels like an arbitrary line that’s drawn to encourage you to buy a more expensive model. Even if both of these limitations are due to the M3 chip, Apple designed these chips itself, and any limitations are intentional. It’s a choice Apple makes.

For me, the appeal of a Pro over the Air is that you get a ticket out of dongletown. I often find myself wanting to plug a third device into my 15-inch Air, which means I have to scramble for a dongle or unplug something I’d rather not. I’ve had that issue with this M3 MacBook Pro, too. Is it the end of the world? Of course not. There are ways to work around it, and not everyone will miss that third port. It’s just the principle of the matter.

While I’m griping, the base 14-inch doesn’t get the space black color option. This is Apple Apple-ing — introducing an arbitrary way to differentiate the upgrade models (and upsell you in the process). I got nothing against space gray, and I’ll have more thoughts on space black (and the M3 Max) in my forthcoming 16-inch MacBook Pro review. But from where I’m standing, just give everyone all the colors!

Faster — but not scary faster

The performance boost from Intel to the M1 chips was significant. Now that we’re well into the third gen of Apple Silicon, the improvements are more incremental. Just look at our benchmark chart comparing the 15-inch M2 MacBook Air and the 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro.

(Note: Cinebench has updated its benchmark since we reviewed a similarly specced 15-inch M2 MacBook Air, so those scores aren’t really comparable. The rest of the tests are the same across platforms.)

In nearly every scenario, the M3 MacBook Pro 14 is slightly better than the M2 MacBook Air 15 — close to the roughly 10 percent mark Apple stated at its “Scary Fast” event. I didn’t include our M1 MacBook Pro 13 scores just because most of the benchmarks we ran on that machine, like Geekbench 5.3, Cinebench R23, and PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro, have since been updated and are no longer comparable. I also didn’t have access to a similarly specced 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro. But the public database of Geekbench 6 scores does have the M1 MacBook Pro 13 from 2020. Looking at that, you can see a more significant improvement, one that’s roughly in line with the 35 percent bump Apple said it would get.

Benchmarks have their time and place, but I suspect folks looking at an entry-level MacBook Pro care less about benchmarks and more about how this laptop would fit in everyday life. I also imagine there are lots of people like me who wonder if the extra juice of a MacBook Pro is worth it or if an Air would suffice.

First off, this is a quiet machine. The fans rarely kicked on, even during the more intensive benchmark tests like PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro or our 4K export test, which simulates video editing workloads. Even then, the fans never got to the point where it was distracting. It wheezed a bit while I ran Shadow of the Tomb Raider on the highest possible settings, though it never got too hot — and 32fps is playable, if not great, for single-player games. Even so, I maintain that Macs — let alone a base M3 — are not for gaming, no matter how much Apple keeps trying to make it happen. You can if you want to... so long as the game you want is even available for Mac.

As for battery life, this laptop refuses to die on me. (Which makes my life difficult when trying to do battery rundown tests.) With the display at 300 nits, adaptive brightness disabled, and all battery-saving options turned off, I got between 12 and 14 hours of constant use every day. Admittedly, 300 nits is bright (I like things bright), and you’ll get a few hours more at the more typical 200 nits for average usage. I’ve no doubt it will go much, much longer if you do use power-saving features or close the lid when not in use. After a roughly three-and-a-half-hour writing session with the aforementioned settings and various other apps running in the background, I only lost 15 percent battery. I watched a two-hour movie, full-screen, and only lost about 20 percent. Your mileage will certainly vary, but just using this as I normally would, I’ve had a hard time getting this thing to zero in a single workday.

My everyday workload never taxed this MacBook, either. At one point, I had an ill-advised 55 open browser tabs, plus my calendar app, a YouTube video going, Messages, Slack, my email app, Photoshop, and several PDFs open at the same time. It was all groovy. I also did this while using my 27-inch monitor via Thunderbolt, streaming Peloton earnings and a recording app. Again, no issues. And that made me realize how hard I whiffed it when I bought my 15-inch M2 Air.

Should you get this over the 15-inch M2 Air?

For me, both the 13-inch MacBook Air and the 16-inch MacBook Pro have obvious audiences. Either you want the lightest laptop for an average workload at a good price or you’re purposely buying the biggest screen and a more powerful chip. It’s less clear for those of us hovering somewhere in the middle. It’ll inevitably lead you to where I’m at: debating between the 15-inch M2 Air and this 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro.

I have a personal stake in finding the answer. I, a dum-dum, was trying to save money and bought a base-model 15-inch M2 Air with just 8GB of RAM a few months ago. I regret that decision immensely. The short of it is, as soon as I open a 20th tab, the beachballing begins. Could I not have several dozen tabs open? Sure, but in 2023, it’s not too much to ask for a $1,300 computer to connect to a monitor and keep its shit together when you have 20 to 30 tabs open. I don’t care what people say online. In my experience, RAM still matters, and it’s silly that the base model only gets you 8GB. Of course, spend within your means, but I think it behooves everyone to get at least 16GB these days. Don’t be me!

In a just world, I’d be able to upgrade the RAM on my existing Air, but alas. I’ve now fallen down a rabbit hole of deciding whether to trade in my Air for a model with 16GB of RAM or just buy a 14-inch Pro for myself. Budget aside, it comes down to whether you want extra screen or extra ports.

The 14-inch’s display feels much less cramped than my company-issued 13-inch M1 Air. I can use it comfortably without my external display, whereas that’s a total pain on the M1 Air. I lined up all three of these computers, plus the new M3 16-inch Pro, side by side, and the 15-inch is truly the perfect screen size for the weight and portability. It’s not that much bigger than the 14-inch, but it’s enough that you can fit a little more information at a glance. For me, the 14-inch is a close second. If you’re unsure, I highly recommend checking these out in person.

Beyond size, even my garbage eyeballs can see the difference ProMotion and brighter SDR and HDR capabilities make on the Pro compared to the Air. But for my workload, it rarely matters because I mostly use this indoors and use my big, beautiful TV for consuming media. If that does matter to you, the Pro is worth considering.

Another odd thing is weight. The 14-inch weighs 3.4 pounds, while my 15-inch MacBook Air weighs 3.3 pounds. I held both, one in each hand, and because of the Air’s larger footprint, it sometimes felt heavier depending on my grip. The Air is still noticeably thinner, but as far as how it feels when you stick it in a backpack — they’re the same. Weight is no longer necessarily a point in the Air’s favor.

Where the 14 wins is ports. I love not having to plug in my dock at my workstation if I want to get a few photos off my SD card. I like that I have the option of using HDMI for my monitor, which makes having only two Thunderbolt ports more bearable than with the Air. Though, depending on how you configure your base M3 model, you might actually find it more economical to get the M3 Pro. At least you’ll get an extra port — and a faster one at that.

The Air’s starting price is $400 lower, but if I configure the 15-inch Air properly for my needs versus a similarly specced 14-inch M3, I’m looking at a whopping $100 difference.

If you want a bigger screen, the Air is the way to go. For most people, the Air is more than powerful enough for their workload. But if you want something a bit more versatile that can handle the odd power-intensive task — or just really really hate dongles — the Pro is the safer bet. You might as well get that extra 10 percent performance the M3 affords, at least until Apple updates the Air to the same chip. So long as you’re also getting 16GB of RAM.

Stuck in the middle with you

Overall, Apple made the right move consolidating and getting rid of the 13-inch Pro. That extra inch of screen is great, everything works beautifully, and the return of physical function keys on the entry-level MacBook Pro is chef’s kiss.

I just wish you got more for the starting price — $1,599 is too much for 8GB of RAM, and just because you can’t use two external displays with an M3 chip doesn’t mean you couldn’t make the most out of three Thunderbolt ports.

It’s hard to tell who Apple imagines using this entry-level MacBook Pro. It seems to have a clearer idea of the serious Pros and the hordes of casual users. But the line between an Air and an entry-level Pro is blurrier than ever. I consider myself smack dab in the heavy Air user / light Pro user category. I spent a lot of time hopping between them while writing this review, running numbers while sifting through various configurations. It just turned me into the confused math lady meme.

Gripes aside, I’ve been very happy using this as my daily driver for the past week. Whichever way you fall, I think you’ll ultimately be happy with either 16GB machine. So, even though I very much believe no one with an M1 or M2 needs to upgrade for speed alone, I’m tempted to buy one of these for myself, if only to rectify my RAM mistakes and get rid of a couple of dongles.

Thanks for reading! I’m still working on our review of the 16-inch with the M3 Max, but can answer any burning questions you might have about it or the 14-inch. Just leave a comment on this quick post and I’ll be answering questions starting at 2PM ET!

While Meta hasn’t reinvented the category, it’s nailed the execution. But culturally, is the timing right for smart glasses?

I’m a smart glasses skeptic. Not because the technology is impossible but because I’ve tested several pairs and even dove deep into the category for a two-part mini-documentary a while back. So when I say I was impressed by the $299 Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, it’s not just that mine came with rose-colored lenses.

To be clear, nothing about the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses is revolutionary. The Google Glass Explorer Edition first introduced us to modern-day smart glasses in 2013. Several other companies, big and small, have since jumped on the bandwagon, including Snap, Bose, Razer, Epson, Amazon, and the now-defunct Focals by North. Most were underwhelming, with potato cameras, washed-out displays, useless voice assistants, and middling mics. I had a hard time imagining the average person liking them enough to own a pair.

I know multiple people who have already bought these.

I get why. These glasses look good. They officially come in 150 style variations across two frame styles, seven colors, and multiple lens options (including color, prescription, and transitions). The camera has been upgraded from 5MP to 12MP. Photo resolution has improved to 3024 x 4032 pixels, while videos are now 1080p at 30 frames per second. There are now five mics instead of one, so you sound better on calls. The speaker quality has also improved. It’s louder, with more bass, less audio leakage, and spatial audio support. They stuffed some AI in there, and you can now livestream to Facebook or Instagram. These are significant updates.

It’d be one thing if Meta failed to deliver, but like I said: I’m impressed. But that, in turn, has raised a lot of questions that I don’t have answers for. All I can say is whatever you think of Meta, these are a turning point for smart glasses.

Glasses fit for Bond (Or Eggsy)

I’ve only seen a handful of Bond flicks, but even I know two things about Agent 007. James Bond looks good, always, and the spy gadgets Q gives him are discreet. The Meta glasses are both and, in many ways, feel like they belong in a spy movie.

The thing about smart glasses is that you’ll never wear a pair if they make you look like a low-rent Warby Parker model. Aside from the original Bose Frames, I’ve never really liked the way I’ve looked in smart glasses so far. That’s why it matters that these are Ray-Bans and come in more styles than typical smart glasses. While Wayfarers are considered to be universally flattering, rounder frames look better on me. Most smart glasses come in tortoiseshell or black, and I’m tired of both, so I was happy that I could pick a round, transparent blue frame with pink lenses. They’re more my style, and while I wish the colors were more noticeable in darker lighting, I dug the extra pop of color in sunlight. I wore these in various scenarios: dolled up for a wedding, clad in functional but hideous running gear, bumming it in sweatpants, and rocking leather jackets. You name it — it goes with everything.

On top of looking good, no one will know you’re wearing tech on your face unless you walk around saying “Hey Meta” at the top of your lungs. Nobody knew I was listening to EXO’s EXIST album on my commute. You can hear some faint audio leakage when you’re at full volume, but that’s only necessary when trying to block out the squeaky rails of the New York City subway system. Your fellow commuters likely won’t notice because they’ve got AirPods in or the ambient noise is louder. More troubling, no one batted an eye whenever I took photos and videos in public or private areas.

All this made me feel like Eggsy from Kingsman: The Golden Circle — another high-tech spy film. There’s a scene where Eggsy takes a call through the glasses during an important dinner. To everyone else, he looked like a dapper gent with some snazzy frames about to eat some fancy food. But because of his glasses, Eggsy was able to hear (and see) things they couldn’t. My experience wasn’t exactly the same. (I had no imminent bombs to defuse.) But the point is I spent a lot of time wearing these in public doing and listening to things that people looking straight at me weren’t aware of. It doesn’t get more incognito than that.

That comes with pros and cons. I’ll get to privacy in a bit, but if you’re worried about looking like a total jabroni, like this pic of me wearing the Bose Frames Tempo, fear not.

In the name of content creation

I have my priorities straight. As soon as I unboxed and paired these glasses, the first thing I did was take a photo and a video of my cats Petey and Pablo. I uploaded them to The Verge’s Slack and sent the video to my spouse and friends. My tech-savvy co-workers found the quality to be surprisingly good for smart glasses. My friends and family thought it was something I took on my phone. Several times during this review process, our own video team remarked that the quality was better than they’d expected.

That’s wild.

If you’re into photography, you’ll be able to suss that the quality doesn’t match up to the latest and greatest phones. But it’s good enough to match a phone from a few years ago and, therefore, shareable on social media and in the group chat. That’s a Big Deal.

To take photos or videos, you can use the “Hey Meta” command or use the capture button on the top of the right arm. You press once for photos and long-press to start recording video. There are also accompanying audio cues and an LED in your right peripheral vision.

I’m not a camera expert, so I asked our resident camera expert Becca Farsace to weigh in. One thing Becca pointed out was the stabilization on the camera is surprisingly good. While there’s some wobbliness, it doesn’t look like garbage, especially when viewed on a phone. Low-light performance was also better than I anticipated. When you move from light to dark environments, you don’t really notice a massive drop in video quality. Color reproduction and details are also solid in good lighting.

I appreciated taking phone-free, hands-free videos in my day-to-day life. I now have so many videos of Petey and Pablo being adorable that would have been difficult to capture otherwise because both my cats get weird when they see my phone come out. They either refuse to look at the camera, leave, or — in Petey’s case — try to eat the camera. It’s also easier to film and interact with my cats when I have both hands free. Case in point, I have enjoyed partaking in the cat-twirling meme — even if it was quite the feat lifting a 19-pound Pablo.

Even if you aren’t obsessed with your pets, I can see this being a more discreet alternative for a GoPro. It’d be easy to film cooking instructions, parts of running or cycling routes, a scenic drive, or even capturing slice-of-life candids of your kids before they grow up too fast.

That said, there are quirks. What you see isn’t what the camera sees because it’s not actually in your eyeball. It’s in front of the left hinge. You have to remember that when framing your shots, or everything will be mildly off-center. This is also how I learned I often tilt my head like a confused puppy. Many times, I went back to photos and videos I’d shot to find they featured unintentional Dutch angles and wisps (or full chunks) of my bangs. Becca had issues with her hat popping up in shots as well.

Also, there’s a one- to two-second delay when taking photos. While walking, a lot of my landscape photos came out blurry if I didn’t stand completely still. It’d be easier if there was a way to preview images via your phone, but there isn’t unless you’re livestreaming.

Speaking of which, livestreaming was hard to test organically, mainly because none of my Instagram followers expect me to livestream. What I can say is that a glasses icon pops up automatically on the livestream screen in Facebook or Instagram. (Though, let’s be real — most content creators aren’t livestreaming to Facebook.) You can either tap the icon or double-click the capture button to seamlessly switch views between your phone camera and glasses. There’s a teeny lag between what you see versus what gets livestreamed, but nothing egregious.

Livestreaming is an example where Meta sort of shot itself in the foot as far as content creation goes. I have no doubt some streamers would love this if they could use this on TikTok or Twitch. But they can’t. Instead, they’re corralled into Meta’s services. It makes sense — Big Tech loves protecting its walled gardens — but from a broader adoption perspective, this is silly. It’s one of the reasons Snap’s Spectacles never took off. Meta’s mostly lucky that Instagram is still popular with influencers.

It’s also easy to import photos and videos from the glasses to your phone, even if you’re on the go. The glasses have their own local Wi-Fi network, and your phone just needs to connect to it with the Meta View app open. It can be a little slow if you have a lot of footage, but even then, it’s not too bad. For example, yesterday, I imported 143 videos and photos. It took a few tries to establish a stable connection, but altogether, it only took about five minutes. It’s a lot faster — maybe two or three minutes — if you’re sending 15 or fewer photos or videos.

One potential con is that videos max out at one minute. Meta says that’s to optimize storage and importing, which is a fair tradeoff in my book. These are clearly meant for social content, especially since all photos and videos are vertical, and there’s no landscape option. Generally, you’re not watching more than a minute-long clip on Reels, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts anyway.

Another thing for content creators to consider is battery life. If you use these lightly, you can get five, maybe six hours on a single charge. If you’re taking a ton of video and photos, that’s going to dwindle to three or four hours. Using the glasses as headphones in my 70-minute commute drained the battery by about 18 to 20 percent. I doubt this will trouble casual users, seeing as these are still a functional pair of glasses if the battery’s dead. But power users — folks who want to get through a whole day of meetings while using these as headphone replacements — may find this annoying.

There are a few mitigating factors. The charging case is a lot slimmer than the previous version, and it is easy to stash in a fanny pack, purse, and backpack. It charges via USB-C, and there’s a new indicator LED button that turns orange while charging and green when everything is full. (This is both for the case itself when it’s empty and for the glasses when they’re in there.) Charging is quick, too. The other day, I went from 15 percent battery after three hours of heavy use to 100 percent in less than an hour. I’ve also had these for a whole week, and aside from the initial charge, I haven’t had to plug in the case whatsoever. You do end up charging the frames multiple times a day because where else are you going to put them when they’re not in use if not the case?

Headphone replacement?

The nice thing about these glasses is you don’t have to use the camera at all. They’re also a viable replacement for your headphones. Unlike the camera, the audio features works like any other Bluetooth headset in terms of what apps you can use, though there is one built-in Spotify integration you can enable.

You control the audio with a gesture control area on the right arm, just under the capture button. There’s a library of gestures in the app, but the most basic ones are tapping once to pause / play audio and sliding forward and back to control volume. Tapping twice will play the next track, while three taps will let you go back a track. If you enable Spotify Tap, you can tap and hold to play your automatic recommendations based on your favorites. On the left arm, right on the hinge, there’s also a small toggle that lets you cut the Bluetooth connection and power to the camera.

Audio quality for music and podcasts is on par with other smart glasses. Like other open-ear headphones, they’re not the best at reproducing thumping bass, but they are better than any ambient mode at helping you maintain situational awareness. Noise-canceling headphones, however, are much more effective at blocking out the world.

Calls are another story. These glasses trump the majority of smart glasses I’ve tested. I’ve taken a few calls from my spouse while on the go in loud environments. I had no trouble hearing them, and they had zero issues hearing me (provided I had good cell service). That’s likely because there are now five mics, one of which is in the nose pad. It made me sound clear in all my videos — almost like I was the main character in a first-person video game.

The lenses you pick can impact whether you want to use these as headphone alternatives. Because Meta sent me a pair of sunglasses, it was tough to see how well these would fare in my usual workday. My greatest regret was not getting these with clear lenses or transitions because sunglasses are limiting. I’m not trying to be one of those people who wears sunglasses indoors. I tried for the sake of this review, but it hurt my eyes after an hour or two. The Transition lenses cost $80 more and are the best option if you want to use these in as many scenarios as possible. As for prescriptions, you can order them directly from Ray-Ban or a participating LensCrafters if you fall in the -6 to +4 range. If you’ve got worse vision, like me, you may want to use them with contact lenses. Otherwise, you could take them to a local optician, but that would void the warranty.

The other neat thing is spatial audio. When you watch videos, you can hear where people were when it was recorded. Alex Cranz, managing editor of The Verge, crept behind me while I was recording at the office to say, “Victoria sucks.” When I replayed it, I could hear her trolling me from behind. Is it something you’ll make use of often? Probably not, but it’s fun nevertheless.

But is it really smart?

Not really. At least, not in the way you’ve probably envisioned smart glasses from sci-fi movies.

For example, the Meta AI and voice assistant? It’s nothing like Peter Parker issuing commands to EDITH via the smart aviators he got from Tony Stark in Spider-Man: Far From Home. While the Meta assistant sounds very natural, it can’t do a whole lot of stuff yet, and it takes a hot second to process commands. The most I used it for was taking photos and videos hands-free, listening to texts as they came in, as well as sending messages. But even here, the Meta assistant got tripped up because my spouse apparently has multiple entries in my contact list. While you can send normal texts, most of my contacts aren’t on Messenger or WhatsApp, and these don’t natively share to non-Meta apps. I imagine this will be more useful to you if these are apps you use frequently.

While AI features on the glasses are in beta, I can’t say that I was ever itching to use a ChatGPT-esque bot in the ways Meta suggested (i.e., writing raps and poems, generating excuses to get out of parties, etc.) However, down the road, audio AI bots could be a useful form of augmented reality. The first version of the Bose Frames tried to make audio augmented reality apps a thing but crashed and burned when third-party developers didn’t glom onto the idea. Meta’s approach is a bit different. In a future feature drop, you’ll be able to ask the AI to identify objects in your surroundings via the camera. That’s a cool idea, and I’ll be eager to see how it works if and when it arrives.

But all said and done, I’m glad Meta didn’t bother attempting a smart display. The tech isn't there yet. When I tried Google Glass Enterprise Edition, Epson Moverio glasses, and Focals by North, trying to focus on the information overlays was hard on my eyes. That’s because these tend to rely on projection tech, which can get easily washed out by bright ambient light. And navigating screens usually requires some kind of physical control. It’s clunky, kills battery life, and introduces the problem of developing third-party app ecosystems.

Privacy: am I the glasshole?

It’s hard to think of smart glasses without remembering that time when a pair of Google Glass got ripped off a person’s face. How subsequently, the people wearing Glass were dubbed glassholes, and how some public spaces banned the device entirely.

But we live in a different era now. People are wearing Quest 3 headsets to coffee shops. Every time I open TikTok, I see normal people and content creators alike vlogging their lives. When I walk outside, people are having very private conversations out loud on FaceTime or through their AirPods. For better or worse, the smartphone has made us all very comfortable with the idea that there are cameras everywhere.

The problem is we don’t have the same social cues for smart glasses as we do phones. If you hold your phone up in a certain way, people know it means you’re recording. If you hold your finger up to the temple of your glasses, you could be adjusting the fit. To address that, Meta added an LED capture light to the original Ray-Ban Stories. Most people didn’t think it was enough. This time around, Meta has made it so you can’t disable the LED light, and it has a pulsing pattern that’s supposed to be more noticeable. When I polled my co-workers, friends, and family, it was a mixed bag. Some said it was easily seen indoors. Others disagreed. Most agreed that while you can see the light outdoors, it’s also easy to ignore or mistake for light reflecting off the lenses.

I took pictures and filmed many times in public, and no one ever noticed. Take from that what you will.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Meta has privacy guidelines and etiquette tips when you set the glasses up and a link to its privacy page in the app. It boils down to don’t be a glasshole. That’s nice, but glassholes are going to use this device however they please. The rest of us have to figure out how to not be a glasshole on the fly.

For example, these glasses are perfect for an outdoor wedding. I just so happened to be invited to one this past weekend. But while it’s normal to take photos and record wedding footage on your phone, would that apply to content taken on smart glasses? It felt wrong to make any unilateral decision, so I asked my friend for permission.

While it was weird to explain, she gave me her blessing. I got to protect my eyes from the sun, discreetly record the ceremony for the couple, keep my phone in my bag, and stay present in the moment. Afterward, my friend was happy to have that footage since there wasn’t a videographer. At the same time, you won’t find those photos or videos in this review because this was a private ceremony. I’m glad that was a conversation I had beforehand, but would anyone in 2023 feel compelled to do this with phones? I can’t count the times I’ve seen people take photos of weddings and post them directly to their own personal feeds.

This applies to so many scenarios. If I take concert footage, am I the glasshole? What if I’m house hunting and want to remember what a property looked like later? Do I alert the real estate agent? What if I’m wearing these as headphones, enter a public restroom, and somebody freaks out because they notice I’m wearing smart glasses? Am I the glasshole for filming my commute to test these glasses? Or is asking permission from my fellow commuters potentially opening me up to physical harm? Is wearing what’s essentially a face-mounted bodycam an invasion of privacy, or is it a safety tool? A co-worker told me they bought a pair of these glasses partly because if someone tries to murder them while walking the dog, they can grab footage of their potential assailant.

I have no real answers here. If everyone had a pair of these tomorrow, would I start to treat people wearing Wayfarers differently? A part of me wishes that I’d be the wary privacy stalwart. But the depressing reality is I already live like everything in my life is surveilled. What do a few hundred extra smart glasses cameras matter?

A turning point

I’ll say it again. Meta isn’t reinventing smart glasses. What it’s done is nail the execution. Culturally, I also think the timing is ripe. We’re more desensitized than ever to surveillance, and a lot of us are trying to look less at phone screens. If smartwatches can field notifications, then maybe smart glasses can replace the camera and take calls in scenarios where phones aren’t ideal.

Are good execution and timing enough? At heart, I remain a smart glasses skeptic. To me, this device appeals most to gadget nerds and content creators rather than the average Joe. But even if these flop, it’s set a new bar for what smart glasses can and should be able to do. Again, I’ve tried a ton of smart glasses, and until now, I’ve never had a pair that looks good, is priced reasonably, has multiple use cases, and delivers what it says it will.

I have no answers for my bigger questions. I won’t have them until smart glasses are a thing — if they’re ever a thing. But in the meantime, I’ll settle for taking more cat videos.

Google’s addressed a lot of what annoyed me about the first Pixel Watch, but repairability and continued Fitbit integration are still question marks.

For whatever reason, being second generally isn’t a good thing in our culture. It’s baked into our vernacular: sophomore slumps, second place is the first loser — even the parable of the prodigal son was about a second-born child. In the world of smartwatches, we never talk about the Apple Watch Series 2, Samsung went straight from the Galaxy Watch to the Galaxy Watch 3, and Wear OS 2 was Bad. So I’m chuffed that the $349.99 Google Pixel Watch 2 is the rare sequel that’s better than the original.

Before this watch launched, I wrote that all it needed was good battery life. Spoiler alert — the Pixel Watch 2 has made big strides on this front (though probably not enough for folks looking for a truly multiday smartwatch). The watch went from being a gadget I had to baby to something that could fit into my everyday life. That, plus a barrage of updates big and small, have, in turn, opened up a lot of possibilities that just weren’t there last year.

It ain’t perfect. While Google addressed many issues I had with the original, the Pixel Watch 2 has quirks and concerns of its own. Over the past week, I’ve had some time to mull over what this means for the Android smartwatch space. I might’ve been too hasty saying better battery life would fix everything, but it puts Google in a position where, in the not-too-distant future, it has the chance to be the best at something.

All-day battery — for real this time

Last year, the Pixel Watch could last 24 hours*.
*If you earned a master’s degree in babying batteries.

In reality, I was plopping it onto a charger twice a day. One day, a short phone call and a 30-minute run cost me 41 percent of the battery. Objectively terrible. Things were better when I revisited the watch in August after a few firmware updates. I could get 24 to 30 hours with the always-on display enabled, though battery drain during activities was still faster than I’d like.

This isn’t a problem anymore. Google’s got a more powerful and more power-efficient processor under the hood, and Wear OS 4’s whole schtick is better battery life. It shows here. This watch is zippier than the original, and for the past week, I’ve had it on maximum brightness, along with the tilt-to-wake gesture and the always-on display enabled. I’ve actively used many of its features and logged 30 to 45 minutes of GPS workouts per day. I am consistently getting 24 hours on a single charge, give or take an hour, with no battery-saving features. And I didn’t even have to wait a day or two for the watch to calibrate to my usage.

Here’s what a recent, relatively active day looked like:

• 6:35AM: Wake up to my cats yowling for kibble. Check my wrist to find that I’ve lost about 22 percent battery overnight because I forgot to turn on Bedtime mode. I’m starting the day with roughly 50 percent battery total.
• 9:43AM: After reading emails, a little work, and breakfast, I trudge outside for a bleary-eyed two-mile run with my Pixel 8 left at home. This ensures the watch isn’t piggybacking off my phone’s GPS. After about 25 minutes, I’ve used only 6 percent.
• 10:15AM: I log that I’ve got 42 percent battery left and get some more work done. The last time I charged to 100 percent was 4PM the previous day. Mental math isn’t my strong suit, but six hours on 42 percent battery seems like I’m on track for 24 hours.
• 1PM: I begin my trek to the office. Commuting is hell, so I spend it futzing around with Pixel Watch 2 settings. I arrive at The Verge office around 2PM with about 35 percent battery.
• 2:30PM: I demo several features for our photographer Amelia Holowaty Krales so this review can look beautiful. The entire session involves walking about 1.5 miles, which the watch tracks automatically. Screens are hard to photograph in bright ambient lighting, so I turn off adaptive brightness while cranking brightness up to max. This is all battery-intensive, and I wonder if we’ll make it back with enough charge.
• 4PM: I hit the 24-hour mark with 20 percent left. We walk back to the office half an hour later, and on the way back, I get a low-power battery message with 15 percent left.
• 4:45PM to midnight: I plop the watch onto the charger at the office. It takes about an hour to get to a full 100 percent. I don’t think about battery for the rest of the day — though I do a breathing exercise, set a few timers, check notifications, send a few texts from the wrist, try out the new safety check feature on the way home, and log my mood after getting a stress tracking alert.

That’s a fairly typical review day for me, but as with any gadget, your mileage will vary. If you optimize battery settings, you could probably push past the 24-hour mark — especially if it’s a day where you’re lounging around at home or glued to your desk at work. If you are using a lot of GPS tracking, it depends on how much you use the watch during said activity.

The most battery-intensive workout I did was a 35-minute GPS walk while streaming an offline YouTube Music playlist and using Safety Check. I was checking my wrist every few minutes, and even so, I only blasted through 15 percent. But for the most part, my runs and walks this week averaged around 25 to 45 minutes, and I typically burned around 6 to 10 percent battery.

One thing: Bedtime mode makes a huge difference. If you turn that on, overnight sleep tracking only drains about 10 to 15 percent battery. The mildly annoying thing is that automating Bedtime mode appears to be tied to Digital Wellbeing, and it’s not intuitive to set up. First, you’ve got to set up a bedtime schedule in your phone’s settings app. While Android phones are required to support Digital Wellbeing in some way, you also have to toggle a switch in the Google Pixel Watch app to sync your phone’s Digital Wellbeing modes with the watch. Also, if you don’t want to use Google’s Digital Wellbeing, you’ll have to turn on Bedtime mode manually via the watch’s quick settings menu.

The only sacrifice, if you can call it that, that the Pixel Watch 2 made for better battery life is that the charger has adopted pogo pins — which some folks were none too pleased about. I wrote about that more in-depth here, but personally, this is a tradeoff I’m happy to make. In my testing, faster charging plus a regular routine means I’ve only lost maybe 45 minutes a day to get up to 95 or 100 percent.

Some folks will see 24-hour battery life as a continued failure. After all, Garmins and Fitbit trackers can last for days, even weeks, without charging. But as far as flagship smartwatches go, Google’s one job was to make a watch that could last an entire day without caveats. And it’s done that.

Fitbit integration and health tracking

Last year, the Google-Fitbit integration and product lineup was a mess. There was the Google Pixel Watch, Fitbit Versa 4, and Fitbit Sense 2 — three smartwatches that were so similar Google had to make up arbitrary reasons to set them apart. The Pixel Watch was missing key Fitbit features. The Fitbits had previously available smart features taken away. None of it made sense.

That’s not as much of a problem this year with the Pixel Watch 2 and the Fitbit Charge 6. You look at these two devices, and you know what to expect out of each.

For this watch, it feels like Google lurked on Reddit, noted the things that people complained about most, and went about fixing them. For example, the Pixel Watch 2 now has automatic workout tracking for seven activity types. This was sort of missing last year, as auto-tracked workouts only popped up in the Fitbit app after the fact. This past week, I reliably got prompts on the wrist for any walk over 10 or 15 minutes, depending on what I chose in the settings — as well as prompts to end workouts if I had been inactive for about five minutes.

Meanwhile, the new multipath sensor supposedly translates to 40 percent greater accuracy for heart rate tracking during rigorous activities. That’s hard to verify, but in runs, the heart rate reported by the Pixel Watch 2 was within five beats per minute or so of my Apple Watch Ultra 2 and my Polar H10 chest strap. And when I raised my wrist mid-run to check my stats, there wasn’t as much lag in reported heart rate as I’ve had with previous Fitbits. Sleep Profiles, abnormal high and low heart rate alerts, irregular heart rhythm alerts, and nightly SpO2 — all features that were missing at launch last year — are all supported.

That said, GPS could be better. The Pixel Watch 2 took much longer than my Ultra 2 and phone to get a signal. It’s understandable since I live in a challenging GPS environment, but the lag was long enough to be mildly annoying. It also tended to overreport my distance by about 0.05 miles per mile. That’s not a big deal if you stick to shorter distances, but it adds up if you’re running half and full marathons.

In one instance, it also erroneously logged a two-mile run in the Fitbit app as 1.3 miles — even though I could clearly see that it registered as 2.09 miles on my wrist. It took about 24 hours before this fixed itself in the Fitbit app, though the map still wasn’t quite right. It’s possible this is due to pre-release software. But while this happened during multiple runs last year, it only affected one GPS workout this year.

The Pixel Watch 2 also gets some much-needed training features. The big one is you now have four personalized heart rate zones: light, moderate, vigorous, and peak. Fitbit’s had them on its trackers for a long time, but the way they’re implemented in the Pixel Watch 2 is easier to understand and read. You can see the color-coded zones on the side, and if you’re so inclined, you can program it so you get notified each time you move between the four zones. You can also choose a target zone and will receive notifications if you move outside it. If you’re training for speed, you can now enable pace alerts as well.

As a runner, these come standard on most training-oriented Garmins and the Apple Watch, and Samsung also introduced similar features with the Galaxy Watch 6. It’s good to see Google and Fitbit catch up here, and the Fitbit app gets kudos for letting you customize your max heart rate. Most companies will “personalize” this based on a cockamamie formula that subtracts your age from 220 while giving you no recourse to alter that if it doesn’t line up with your actual fitness levels.

As for whether these exercise views are more readable: yes and no. The metrics and other information like heart rate zones and pace are. It’s much easier to digest information at a glance — provided the sun doesn’t have other plans. The Pixel Watch 2’s display just doesn’t get bright enough in direct sunlight, and even brightness boost settings don’t do much to fix that.

Text me when you get home

It’s a culturally ingrained habit that whenever I hang out with my gal pals, we all say, “Text me when you get home.” We don’t go to bed until we can confirm our buddies got home safely. Likewise, I text my spouse anytime I’m on my way back or if I head out while they aren’t home.

So, understandably, I quite like the Pixel Watch 2’s Safety Check feature. It’s a proactive timer that you can set so that, should something happen to you, your loved ones have a better shot of knowing where to find you. You can specify an activity (e.g., taking public transportation, going for a walk alone, etc.), a duration, and whether you want to notify your emergency contacts why you’re starting this timer. Once that time is up, you have the option to turn it off or your location will be automatically shared with your preset emergency contacts and local emergency services. If you’re in a real pickle, you don’t need to wait for the timer to lapse, either — you can discreetly share your location should the need arise. It’s thoughtfully designed, and I appreciated the level of specificity I had at my fingertips.

As a lifelong city dweller, I’ve had several dicey encounters, and so this became something I used every time I left the house or office. Granted, my spouse ignored most of the alerts because I was “just testing something for work,” but my best friend dug the notifications. She gets it. My main problem was forgetting to turn off the timer when I got to where I was going. In the future, some geofencing capabilities might be useful.

Another feature I liked was Safety Signal, which lets you use cellular emergency SOS features even if you don’t have an active LTE plan. To test this, I purposefully didn’t activate LTE on my Pixel Watch 2 and lo — I was still able to use Safety Check on my solo walks even when I left my Pixel 8 at home.

What I don’t love about Safety Signal is it requires you to pay the extra $50 for the LTE model of the Pixel Watch 2 and you must have a Fitbit Premium subscription. So, technically, you’re still paying for that cellular connectivity; it’s just that you can only use it in emergencies, and it saves you a grand total of $10 per month over having Premium and LTE all the time. Buying a Pixel Watch 2 gets you six months of Premium free, but whether the cost makes sense is up to your individual needs. For me, the math isn’t quite mathing. I understand the intent and that there are technological requirements at play, but it’d be much cooler if every Pixel Watch had this capability at no extra cost.

That said, it’s nice to know that safety features won’t be limited to the Pixel Watch 2.

“Personal safety is very important to us, so we are making sure people who have Pixel Watch 1 can also get all of the latest peace of mind features, like Safety Check,” Google spokesperson Sofia Giovanello tells The Verge. “It will be available to them very soon and will be the same experience. Much like the rest of the Pixel portfolio, Pixel Watch will continue to get updates over time.”

Stress tracking

After a day of running around the Made by Google event like a headless chicken, I set up the Pixel 8 and Pixel Watch 2 and grumpily rode the ferry home. About an hour later, I got my first stress alert.

The Pixel Watch 2 adds the Fitbit Sense 2’s continuous electrodermal activity (cEDA) and skin temperature sensors. This helps enable Fitbit’s proactive stress tracking. When signs of physical stress are detected, you can choose to receive notifications that prompt you to log your emotions, do a breathing session, or take a walk. A week later, I remember nothing about how I felt during that first alert, except that at the time, I marked myself as happy. Right before bed, at around 11:30PM, I got another alert, and this time, I marked myself as frustrated. Again, I don’t remember why.

While imperfect, this delayed prompting actually encourages you to try and remember how you felt. Mood logging is an unnatural behavior, and it gives you an opportunity to engage and reflect if that’s something you’re interested in. Apple introduced a similar feature in watchOS 10, but because it’s passive, I never remember to use it. This at least reminds me to think back to a time and a place. And over the past week, it’s been curious to see the disconnect between my physiological stress and emotional well-being.

Last week was a personal rollercoaster. On top of a busy workweek, my grandma died, I closed an emotional chapter in dealing with my mom’s estate, and out of nowhere, I somehow scratched the living bejeezus out of my Pixel Watch 2 review unit (more on that below). You’d think the Pixel Watch 2 would’ve been buzzing like a swarm of angry bees. But no. I may be stuck on the struggle bus, but I rarely triggered the alerts and generally didn’t get notified until several hours later.

For example, the Pixel Watch 2 remained silent when my cousin called to say my grandma had passed. Truthfully, I’m not surprised. Grief is a funny thing, and I didn’t really “feel” anything until I ugly cried on my commute home. (It is a New York City rite of passage to privately bawl in public.) About an hour after that, when I was home and processing my feelings with a pint of ice cream, that’s when I got the stress alert. The time period indicated? Exactly when I was crying my eyes out. It was a bit weird, but I logged my mood as sad and did a little breathing session. It fixed nothing, yet I felt 3 percent better.

That’s one extreme. On the other, my most recent stress alert was for a one-hour period when I was stuffing my face with Korean barbecue. That, I logged as a happy moment.

There may be a personal element to why I don’t get as many stress alerts as I think I should. If anything, I’ve taken away that I’m excellent at compartmentalizing during periods of high stress, and as my therapist says, I need to work on feeling my emotions in my physical body. It’s been something to reflect on this past week — and that’s not nothing.

Repairability when?

Google doesn’t have a plan when it comes to Pixel Watch or Pixel Watch 2 repairability. This is not great because, for the second year in a row, The Verge ended up with a messed up Pixel Watch screen. Last year, my colleague Chris Welch ended up with a cracked display within days despite doing nothing out of the ordinary. This year, my Pixel Watch 2 ended up with deep scratches on day two.

I have no idea how this happened. I did not partake in extreme sports, and I didn’t faceplant during my runs. It was fine when I went to bed. I woke up, took it off to shower, and when I sat down to work to record my overnight battery drain, scratches were everywhere.

After reporting the damage to Google, I gave them my scratched-up unit to see if they could figure out how it happened. Right after this review first published, Google reached back out to tell me that the scratches appear to be the result of scraping against a hard or uneven surface, and are unlikely to be something related to incidental contact. The only thing I can think of that fits that scenario is perhaps my arm brushed against my metal bed frame while I was asleep. Otherwise, I’m still clueless.

Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

Reviewer privilege is Google rushing out a new device to me as soon as I told them. I doubt you’d have the same luck if you were a regular paying customer and not writing a review for a tech publication. I asked Google to outline what the average person could expect if this were to happen to them and Giovanello gave me the same response as the last time I asked.

“At this moment, we don’t have any repair option for the Google Pixel Watch. If your watch is damaged, you can contact the Google Pixel Watch Customer Support Team to check your replacement options.”

Google can’t continue to leave Pixel Watch 2 owners in the lurch. It has a partnership with iFixit for its Pixel phones — why not its other devices? [Update: shortly after initial publication, Giovannello emailed to clarify that Google has decided to extend Preferred Care to Pixel Watch 2 in the US and Canada. That’s good news, as this wasn’t available for the original watch, and was a criticism I had when this review first published. Giovannello also says Google will “continue to explore customer support options and will share updates as they become available.”]

Ironically, design is the aspect of the Pixel Watch 2 that Google’s changed the least, but it’s probably the area it needs to rethink the most. Don’t get me wrong. This is a gorgeous watch, and I love how the water droplet-inspired display looks on my wrist. But it behooves Google to consider sapphire crystal based on all the complaints of cracked screens on Reddit — not to mention the cracks and scratches Verge staff have personally experienced. As a tiny-wristed person, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it also ought to consider a larger size. The 41mm case looks great on my bird wrists, but I’ve heard many of my colleagues complain that it looks too dainty on them.

I still think we could all chill about the bezels, though.

All the small things

It’s saying something that, so far, I’ve only touched on the main updates. There are several tweaks and updates that I haven’t gotten to, so here’s a lightning round of smaller things that did and didn’t work for me.

• The new recycled aluminum case is not light enough to justify getting rid of stainless steel while keeping the price at $349.99.
• If you get a Pixel Watch 2 and are a legacy Fitbit user, you’ve got to migrate your Fitbit data to a Google account ahead of the 2025 deadline to use the watch. I don’t love this, but dems the breaks.
• I like many of the new watchfaces! Adventurer is my favorite and the one you see most through this review. Analog Arcs is also great. I’m less of a fan of the big, numbers-only faces, but that’s because I love my glanceable data.

• In theory, I like the new At a Glance complication. It’s meant to be a contextual widget that shows you relevant information throughout the day (i.e., calendar events, temperature, etc.). But so far, it’s only shown me the temperature!
• Gmail for Wear OS is convenient but clutters up my notifications feed. I have liked having Calendar on my wrist, though. Super helpful.
• Wear OS 4 adds cloud backups. Once I read the instructions, swapping between the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro was pretty easy, and I didn’t have to factory reset. Huzzah!
• The new Material You design language is hit or miss. It’s great on the wrist — the new inhale and exhale animations for breathing exercises are pleasing to watch. It’s taking me some time to get used to the new look within the Fitbit app. The more simplistic palette makes it easier to breeze past some metrics.

Almost there

For a watch that looks nearly identical to its predecessor, the Pixel Watch 2 is notably better in every way that really matters. Last year, I had a long list of things Google and Fitbit needed to work on. (Battery life was written in all caps, underlined several times.) This year, that list is much smaller. What the next Pixel Watch needs to deliver is repairability, durability, and a larger size option. Everything else — including wonky GPS — I expect is due to pre-release software or will improve via updates, just as it did last year.

After this week, I’m increasingly convinced that Google has the wherewithal to make the best Android smartwatch in the not-too-distant future. It just needs to — excuse my French — keep its shit together. That means clearly communicating what’s happening with this ongoing Fitbit integration, which, to my eye, is the most obvious potential stumbling block outside of its fragile screens. Change is never easy, but legacy Fitbit users have been through enough this year, and Google can’t afford to backslide here.

With the Pixel Watch 2, Google is almost there. More so than with its Pixel phones, Android smartwatches are where Google has a shot of being really good at something. And unlike Samsung, it has momentum on its side. My one concern is that should Google succeed here, it’ll start entering the Pixel Watch into the ecosystem wars. I didn’t see overt signs of that while testing, but there’s a forthcoming feature where you’ll be able to screen calls from the Pixel Watch 2 — if it’s paired to a Pixel phone. Maybe it’s nothing, but success is the slipperiest slope into a walled garden.

If I were Samsung, I’d be nervous.

Update, October 11th, 2:36PM ET: Added updated warranty information and Google’s results analyzing what happened to my scratched-up Pixel Watch 2.

Iterative updates aren’t flashy, but these smartwatches are mainly for folks who don’t have Apple Watches yet.

Some years, there are updates that completely upend an entire category. Others, you get something like the $399-plus Apple Watch Series 9 and the $799 Ultra 2 — steady improvements that technically add up to the best Apple Watches we’ve ever seen. Just not by a whole lot. And not if you’ve already got a recent Apple Watch model.

It makes sense that 2023’s updates are quiet compared to last year when Apple effectively kicked down the door with not one, not two, but three new smartwatches. This year, the Series 9 and Ultra 2 are nearly identical in design to their predecessors, save new colors, strap options, and carbon-neutral packaging. Instead, the big updates this year are the S9 SiP, the addition of a second-generation ultra wideband chip, and watchOS 10. The former promises a 30 percent faster GPU and a four-core Neural Engine with twice the performance of the Series 8. That, in turn, enables onboard Siri processing, greater power efficiency, and the handy double-tap gesture. The upgraded UWB chip enables Precision Finding, much like AirTags. Meanwhile, watchOS 10 reintroduces widgets to Apple’s smartwatch landscape.

After a few months with watchOS 10 and about a week with the Series 9 and Ultra 2, I genuinely like the new updates. But whether the latest Apple Watches are the best options for iOS users isn’t the point anymore. They are. The real questions are whether the new updates are worth the cost to upgrade, and if you’re going to buy a new Apple Watch, which one makes the most sense for you?

Pink is in, leather is out

The aluminum Series 9 comes in a new pink color — and as far as design goes, that’s all that’s visibly new. Otherwise, you’re looking at the same design and 41mm / 45mm sizes as the Series 8 and the Series 7 before that.

Pink is easily the best new color Apple’s introduced for the watch in years. First, it’s actually pink, unlike the green Series 7, which only looked green if the light hit just right. Second, this is the year of our queen and savior Barbie. Technically, it’s more Millennial pink than Barbie pink, but that’s probably a good thing. Normally, I kvetch about how Apple shies away from saturated color, but the extra subtlety here makes for a more versatile watch. Depending on the strap, you can either emphasize or de-emphasize the pinkness for whatever the situation calls for.

The Ultra 2 is even harder to differentiate from the Ultra. When I got my hands-on at Apple Park, a representative advised I stow my Ultra in my bag — lest I accidentally leave it behind. Even the back crystal on the Ultra 2 just reads “Ultra,” unlike the Series watches, which always specify which Series they are. This entire week, I’ve had to rely on very minimal signs of wear and tear on my original Ultra to tell these two watches apart.

Even less visible is the fact that Apple is using more recycled materials in both the Series 9 and Ultra 2. The Sport Loop, for example, is made of 82 percent recycled yarn, up from 0 percent. The aluminum Series 9 is made from 100 percent recycled aluminum, while the Ultra 2 is made from 95 percent recycled titanium. The speckled flecks in silicone Nike straps you’ll see throughout this review are also recycled. Apple also sent me its FineWoven strap, which is made of 68 percent post-consumer recycled material and is meant to act as a leather alternative. ‘Cause Apple doesn’t do leather anymore.

FineWoven is fine. It’s kinda like suede: soft and a lil’ fuzzy. If you scrape it with a nail, it shows the scratch like suede would. It’s hard to say whether it’ll develop a patina, as I simply haven’t had it long enough, but I wouldn’t recommend working out in it (or in any leather strap, for that matter). I thought the strap was fetching on my stainless steel 45mm review unit, but the texture was a lot more polarizing among my co-workers. Most said they weren’t fans but couldn’t articulate why. If you’re debating getting one, I would swing by an Apple Store first to get a feel for it first.

S9, Siri, and Screens

I never like it when gadget companies say a new processor makes things a lot better. Unless you have a very laggy device, minute improvements in performance are hard for the average person to see. Granted, processor specs matter more with Android smartwatches because they’ve historically been plagued by laggy screens and performance issues. But with the Apple Watch, this has been less of a problem. That said, there are a few instances where you can see the slight difference the S9 makes.

First off, the improved Neural Engine on the S9 SiP means Siri processing happens on device. That, in turn, purportedly leads to 25 percent better dictation and the ability to issue Siri commands when offline. Later this year, you’ll also be able to ask Siri health-related queries.

To test the improved Siri, I ran two experiments. First, I dictated several long texts, tongue twisters, as well as Bohemian Rhapsody and Alphabet Aerobics lyrics, and sent them to my best friend. (She is a patient saint.) For the tongue twisters and song lyrics, I simultaneously dictated to an S8-powered Ultra and an S9-powered Series 9. You can check the gallery above with screenshots of the results. It’s impressive that both watches got about 95 percent accuracy (and I dictated these fast), but I didn’t see a huge difference between the results.

With texts featuring Korean words, Siri did an admirable job for more common words like bulgogi but still messed up some names of our favorite K-pop singers and actors. It’s not a perfect test, but to me, that means I still have to enunciate clearly when using foreign words in English (aka Konglish). That said, I’ve used actor Mahershala Ali’s name as a Siri litmus test over the past few years. Back in 2018 and 2019, Siri would often get tripped up on it. I’m happy to say this year, it nailed it 100 percent of the time.

What might be more useful is the fact that you can issue Siri basic tasks when you have no internet or cellular connectivity. For example, I was able to ask Siri to set timers and workouts with airplane mode enabled both on the watch and on my iPhone. Say your laundry room is in the basement, your hands are full with a laundry basket, and you forgot your iPhone upstairs. You can now ask Siri to set a timer and not worry about it. This won’t work 100 percent of the time when Siri has to pull information from the internet, however. But, if you do get a weather update preloaded from when you had internet, I found that Siri can still give you an update. (Though it may not be the most up-to-date information.)

The S9 SiP also results in greater power savings, but you should already know that Apple’s reinvested that somewhere other than better battery life. In this case, Apple decided to make the displays brighter. The Series 9 now goes up to 2,000 nits from 1,000 nits, while the Ultra 2 is 50 percent brighter at 3,000 nits. Indoors and outdoors, it’s difficult to tell the difference if you don’t have older models on hand for comparison. And even if you do, as I did, it can still be difficult to tell under certain lighting conditions.

That’s because Apple makes ample use of the ambient light sensor. Just because you can manipulate the Series 9 or Ultra 2 to go up to maximum brightness doesn’t mean the watch is giving you everything it’s got. It’s dependent on your environment, which is to give your eyes a break and save battery. You’re most likely to see the difference outside on a very sunny day.

As for battery life, I’m still investigating. Without any low-power settings, I’ve gotten roughly 25 to 30 hours on both the 41mm and 45mm Series 9 and about two and a half days on the Ultra 2. Granted, I’m recovering from some calf strain; we’ll have to see how both watches fare when I get back to training.

On the one hand

Perhaps the most novel update to the Series 9 and Ultra 2 is the double-tap gesture. Or, as my colleague Dan Seifert more accurately describes it, the pinchy pinch. It’s similar to double-clicking with a mouse, except you’re making a pinching motion with your index finger and thumb. It’ll come via a software update sometime in October, but Apple sent us a separate Series 9 loaded with a beta version of the feature so I could give it a whirl.

Technically speaking, this tech isn’t new. With watchOS 8, Apple debuted AssistiveTouch, an accessibility feature for those with limb differences, and double-tap uses the same underlying technology. The sensors can detect changes in blood flow when the muscles in your forearm move, and that, in turn, allows you to control the device and navigate menus with one hand.

That said, double-tap and AssistiveTouch are not quite the same thing. For starters, AssistiveTouch is more power-intensive, as it’s run directly on the CPU, while double-tap’s algorithm has been optimized to run in the background via the S9’s Neural Engine. (Apple says this is why double-tap is limited to the Series 9 and Ultra 2.) That’s also why AssistiveTouch is something you have to set up, whereas double-tap is enabled systemwide by default. Plus, AssistiveTouch supports a wider range of gestures, like a single tap or fist clench, and you can customize what certain gestures do (i.e., scrolling, moving forward or back, selecting an action, etc.). It has to be that way because it’s designed for you to navigate the entire Apple Watch single-handedly. Double-tap is meant to be a more contextual way to handle the primary actions of an app.

For example, say you get a text. If you double-tap, it’ll bring up the ability to reply via voice messages. Double-tapping again will send the message. For a timer, double-tapping once will pause the timer. Doing it again will unpause it. When the timer goes off, pinchy pinching will stop the timer. I’ve also used it to control the camera shutter, control my music, snooze alarms, scroll through watchOS 10’s widget stack, and answer / end calls.

This is an excellent feature, but it’s not without its quirks. For one thing, it comes with a learning curve. For it to work, you must first do the raise-to-wake gesture. (This is to prevent accidental triggers.) You also have to learn the timing. Too fast or too slow won’t work, and between selecting actions, there’s a slight pause. When I was first trying out demos at Apple Park, I was definitely too fast and aggressive. Once I got my review unit, however, I got the hang of it relatively quickly.

It’s also not the best at multitasking. If you navigate away from a timer, for example, you won’t be able to just double-tap to pause or restart while it’s running in the background. Once it goes off, you can double-tap again since it’s back at the forefront. The same goes for snoozing alarms. You’ll probably have to use Siri — or your other hand — if you’ve got a lot going on at once.

Another thing: I wish it were slightly more customizable. Apple designed this to be intuitive, but not everyone will think double-tap ought to do the same thing. I get why in the Messages app, the gesture will bring up a voice reply. However, I’d love it if I could use it to scroll through quick text replies, select one, and send it. Apple is aware of this, as you can customize what the double-tap will do for music playback and the smart widget stack. For instance, you can decide whether the gesture will pause / play a track or skip it. (I prefer the skip function!) For the smart stack, you can decide between scrolling through widgets or selecting the first one you’ve got pinned up top.

Overall, there’s more to like about double-tap than not. It quite literally turns the Apple Watch from a two-handed device into one that can be used single-handedly like a smartphone. If you’ve got an Apple Watch, then you’ve undoubtedly had an instance when your hands were occupied, and you had to use your nose to select a button. This solves that. Frankly, I firmly believe it’ll change the way we interact with wearables going forward.

I also dig that you don’t have to use your index finger. The feature also works with your middle, ring, and pinky fingers — though it may not work quite as well with the latter two. Even so, it’s great that you have alternatives in the event you lose or break your index finger.

Apple isn’t the first to come out with a gesture-based smartwatch feature. Samsung also has something very similar to AssistiveTouch for its Galaxy Watches. That said, Apple’s taking it a step further and making this part of the default system interface. It’s a powerful example of how accessible design benefits everyone. I hope Apple continues to iterate and improve on this feature and that other smartwatch makers follow suit.

Precision Finding

Some of us never misplace our phones. Precision Finding on the Series 9 and Ultra 2 is not for those people. This is for those of us who ring our phones multiple times a day and lose them in odd places. True story: I once left my phone inside my fridge while dazed, hangry, and confused at the height of the covid-19 pandemic.

Precision Finding on the Apple Watch is similar to how you find AirTags with your phone. At first, you bring up the control panel and ring your phone like normal. Once you’re within range of your phone, you’ll see an approximate distance and some directional guidance. When you’re within six feet, you’ll hear another beep from your phone.

To test the feature, my co-worker Owen Grove sent me on a scavenger hunt in The Verge’s office. He hid an iPhone 14 Pro Max paired with an Ultra in one area and an iPhone 15 paired with a Series 9 in another. Although I heard the iPhone 14 Pro Max ring first, it was incredibly faint, and I didn’t really have a clue where it could be. After meandering around, the Series 9 was able to pick up a signal once I was within roughly 50 feet. It was super easy to find my iPhone 15 after that — the whole thing only took about three minutes. Finding the iPhone 14 Pro Max was trickier since I had to rely on sound — The Verge’s office layout is maze-like, so my Ultra lost connection fairly frequently because of all the walls. It took about double the time to find the 14 Pro Max.

We also tested the feature outside, and this time, the range extended to roughly 80 feet on account of all the open space. That said, it had a hard time getting a precise lock when Owen was actively moving around with the iPhone 15. Instead, an icon pops up, letting you know that the phone is currently in motion. In other words, this feature works better if your phone is stationary.

But as much as I love this feature, it requires that your phone also has the new second-generation UWB chip, which means it’s limited to the iPhone 15 lineup. So, if you plan on upgrading only your Apple Watch, this isn’t a feature you’re going to have right away. Also, for now, it’s limited to your phone only; you can’t use this to find an AirTag with your Series 9 or Ultra 2.

watchOS 10

I’ve written about most of the new features in watchOS 10 in my preview earlier this year. In a nutshell, widgets are back in a big way. Apple’s native apps have been redesigned so they’re more glanceable, and there’s a hell of a lot less scrolling. The controls have also been reconfigured. Swiping up no longer brings up the control panel but a list of widgets. To get the control panel, you now have to press the side button while double-pressing the crown brings up your recent apps.

However, there are a few new watchfaces that we didn’t get to see in the beta — a solar analog face and a new Modular Ultra face. The solar analog face is on the simpler side. Its main thing is that the light trail behind the second hand changes from light to dark depending on whether it’s day or night. The Modular Ultra face is exclusive to the Ultra and Ultra 2 but is a dream for data nerds, aka me. You can pack in seven complications — six small ones and a larger one in the center. The bezel can also show either elevation, depth, or seconds in real time.

Like double-tap, watchOS 10 is one of those updates that has larger implications for how we’ll interact with the Apple Watch down the road. Together, these two updates make the Apple Watch much more glanceable and distinct from a “mini phone on your wrist.” Meanwhile, cellular capability and the fact that Siri now works more seamlessly offline give you a device that’s more independent of your phone. There’s a shift happening here, but Apple isn’t busting down the door like the Kool-Aid Man. It’s a gentle shift where Apple puts down some building blocks, sits back, and waits to see what people build with it.

Watches for newbies

Iterative updates aren’t bad. They’re just not flashy, and that’s the biggest problem facing the Series 9 and Ultra 2. These are the best smartwatches Apple’s ever made, but while the updates do make the overall experience better, it’s like paying another dollar to add an extra topping to your pizza. For some people, that makes the pizza. For others, it’s nice but really not necessary. And, of course, smartwatches cost hundreds of dollars.

If you have a Series 7 or later, you don’t really need to update. For owners with a Series 5 or earlier, it might be worth it since you’ll get a bigger screen, several new sensors, and a processing bump. Series 6 owners are the ones I see being most on the fence — and to those folks, I mostly encourage upgrades if your battery life isn’t cutting it anymore. For folks with an Ultra, seriously. Cool your jets. You’re getting the Modular Ultra watchface with watchOS 10, and 3,000 nits vs. 2,000 nits doesn’t make a huge difference.

Otherwise, the biggest case I can make for an upgrade is if you must have double-tap — either because you’ve got minor dexterity issues or think it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread. If you’re on the fence, I suggest trying AssistiveTouch out for an afternoon to see whether you like the idea of using gestures (understanding, of course, that double-tap has a different purpose within the context of the UI). That said, if you don’t often find yourself tapping your Apple Watch with your nose, this probably isn’t a feature you’d need right away.

But speaking frankly, Apple did not make these watches for folks looking to upgrade. It made them for people who don’t have an Apple Watch already. And it’s still true that the majority of people buying Apple Watches each year are new to the platform. For those folks, these are the latest and greatest. Well, until next year.

Got any lingering questions about double tap, precision finding, Siri, the S9, why they didn’t call this the Ultra Deuce? I’ll be answering your questions live today, September 20th, from 12:30-1:30PM ET! Just post your questions in the comments of this quickpost.

I’ve been testing the Ergatta and Aviron Strong for months. Both are great rowers, but I’m struggling to see a future for pricey connected fitness hardware.

Sitting in the middle of my living room is the $2,499.99 Ergatta rower. About 10 miles and a 40-minute ferry ride away, the $2,199.99 Aviron Strong lurks in The Verge’s office. At a glance, these two rowers look different. The Ergatta has an elegant wooden frame and a water tank that mesmerizes my cats. The Aviron, meanwhile, looks more like a traditional black and steel piece of exercise equipment — utilitarian but sleek in its own way.

I genuinely like both for different reasons. But these rowers share a fundamental problem: I’m often not compelled to use them.

It’s not because they’re bad rowers, either. If this were a traditional review, I’d give each a seven out of 10. Both are atypical for connected fitness machines in that they focus on little minigames instead of instructor-led classes. Ergatta reimagines rowing as a set of aesthetically pleasing abstract games that sneakily teach you the concepts behind rowing as a whole — strokes per minute, your 500m split, etc. Ergatta workouts are meditative (especially with the swooshing of real water) and make me feel energized yet calm.

The Aviron Strong has a series of more straightforward games, including one where you row madly away from a digital shark. It’s also a unicorn among connected fitness devices because you can use its screen to watch Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Disney Plus.

And yet. Although I work out almost every day, I rarely want to pick the rower. It’s not a matter of access. There’s a rower at the office and at home. It’s not a matter of efficiency, either. Rowing works out 86 percent of your muscles while also getting in some low-impact cardio — it’s one of the most efficient workouts I could do. It’s not even a problem of enjoyment. I like rowing. A lot, actually.

After mulling it over, my issue is with both rowers, the companies want me to interact with their hardware in a specific and pretty limited way. Sometimes, a meditative rowing game or furiously rowing away from a virtual shark is exactly what I need. I’m not a competitive person, but every once in a while, even racing other members can be fun. Both of these rowers are great at that aspect. On days when I’m feeling this kind of workout, it’s easy to pick the rowers. Providing structure in this way can be helpful for beginners, but it can also be limiting as your needs evolve over time. (And they will.)

The trouble is that some mornings, my grumpy ass needs an instructor made of sparkles and rainbows to beam their radioactive positivity at me. Unfortunately, Ergatta doesn’t have classes at all, and Aviron’s class selection is pretty limited, with so-so music. If you don’t like their single instructor, tough noogies. (He’s not bad though!)

I almost always wish I could listen to my own music, but neither machine lets me do that. While Aviron does support Spotify for music streaming, I don’t use Spotify for my playlists. I use Apple Music or locally downloaded files on my phone. (Actually, of all the connected fitness machines I’ve tested, only the Tempo Move has ever let me listen to my own playlist.) I’d love to watch my favorite TV shows during longer rows. That’s a no-go on the Ergatta, and while you can stream from several services on the Aviron Strong, that requires both an Aviron subscription and Netflix (or Hulu or Disney Plus). If you don’t have the streaming sub, you’re stuck with Aviron’s content. If you need to pause your Aviron subscription or find you don’t like that content, you’re left with a machine that just reports metrics on a fancier screen. That’s true of every connected fitness machine.

You know what would let me do all of these things whenever and wherever I want? A much cheaper home rower (or the ones at the gym), my phone, and app subscriptions I already have. (Or free YouTube classes!) It’s what I do for running. On the days when I can’t run outside, I use the treadmill in my apartment building or hotel gym with either a workout or my own playlist loaded up on my phone. This flexibility and affordability are what’s allowed me to maintain this running habit of mine for years. When I don’t have a rower at home, I’ll probably do the same thing.

Looking back, it’s a common complaint I’ve had with all the spin bikes, treadmills, rowers, and other connected fitness equipment I’ve tested. Why should anyone pay this much to be hamstrung on what they can do with a device they supposedly own? And whenever I send these machines back after a review, I don’t ever miss the hardware. (My cats, however, will miss the Ergatta dearly.) If I miss anything, it’s the content. But is access to content worth an extra $1,000 or more upfront, not to mention the monthly fee required to actually access the content?

It will be for some people and absolutely not for others. The best I can say as a reviewer is here’s what I liked, here’s what I didn’t like, and here are your other options if the price is not right. But if you look at the state of connected fitness, I would say most people are voting with their wallets — and their answer is not really.

Connected fitness flourished during the early days of the pandemic when gyms were closed and people were stuck at home, but it’s taken a major hit since covid-19 restrictions eased and vaccines became widely available. Peloton’s business woes are an entire saga. Other companies like Hydrow (another rower) and Tonal started 2023 with layoffs — and these were not first-round layoffs, either. Lululemon bought Mirror for $500 million during the pandemic fitness craze, and it was a gamble that did not pay off. It’s now trying to sell that business but struggling to find a buyer.

Paying a premium seemed like a more solid investment back when everyone was cooped up at home. Since then, there’s been record inflation, thousands of layoffs, and a not-so-great economy. Forking over thousands of dollars for single-use, paywalled machines in exchange for content seems like a bad deal — especially since there are so many other alternatives that don’t cost this much.

For example, the Concept2 rower is beloved by enthusiasts, comes with a device holder, and costs $990. There are cheaper rowers that cost around $600 to 700. My cats don’t even have to miss the Ergatta’s water tank — there are similar water rowers that range from $500 to $1,500. Spin bikes can be found for $300 to $500, while you can find a good treadmill for $500 to $1,000. If you want metrics, all kinds of fitness trackers are available for $200 to $500. Fitness apps can cost as little as $40 to $70 annually, and many often come with community features. Also, YouTube is a free resource where you can watch dozens of videos from fitness professionals. The vast majority of connected fitness equipment will set you back at least $1,500 plus monthly subscriptions ranging from $25 to 40. Ergatta’s range from $26 to 29 monthly, while Aviron’s cost between $24 and 29.

I wanted to have enough to say about the Ergatta and Aviron to warrant two separate full-length reviews, as I had intended. Instead, I found myself echoing the same overall pros and cons of the last two connected rowers I reviewed: the Hydrow Wave and Peloton Row. They’re expensive. They take up a lot of space, though all four companies say they’re compact for apartment living. The content is good, but there are the limitations I outlined earlier. There are differences, sure, but it all boils down to price and personal preference. It’s hard to not feel like all four connected rowers are adrift in a sea of overpriced connected fitness machines, all struggling to stay afloat at a time when premium fitness isn’t a necessity. And it’s not just rowers. I’m starting to feel this way about all these bikes, treadmills, mirrors, and other connected fitness machines, too.

As a reviewer, it’s increasingly hard to recommend the average person drop thousands for these products when connected fitness is still trying to regain its footing — even if I like them. This is especially true since smartwatches cost several hundred less and can offer coaching, reminders, and health alerts. Apple has Fitness Plus, which fully integrates with your existing Apple products for $70 annually. The classes are downloadable, your Apple Watch provides on-screen metrics, and it can be used with whatever machine you have access to. Many Garmin watches come with Garmin Coach — which, for runners and cyclists, is a great free training plan that’s based on your personal metrics. Even Peloton now offers three app-only subscriptions. (It doesn’t get full credit for moving away from expensive hardware, however, because the company said recently that it plans to relaunch the Peloton Tread Plus at $6,000.) You could argue that some equipment, like the Peloton Row or Tempo, offer form guidance. To that I say, the tech is not fully baked yet and is often wonky, hard to trust, or inaccurate.

Ultimately, I can’t see a future for connected fitness that’s reliant on pricey dedicated hardware. Companies have to figure out a way to make these machines truly affordable, divorce the content from the hardware, and allow people the flexibility to use their platform in a way that suits them best. Until that’s a reality, these machines are starting to feel like boondoggles.

All I’m saying is I’d love it if I could pay a small monthly subscription to play Aviron or Ergatta games on my gym’s rower. But I can’t, so I won’t.

Correction, September 13th, 2023, 1:00 PM ET: This article has been updated to clarify that Aviron only supports Spotify for music streaming, but not Apple Music, the author’s preferred music streaming platform.

Continuous glucose monitoring still isn’t a proven thing for nondiabetics, but you can learn a little about yourself, provided you can pay.

Standing in my bathroom, staring at the needle poking out of a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), I started having second thoughts.

CGMs measure glucose levels in interstitial fluid — the fluid between your cells. Unlike traditional fingerprick tests, they can give you real-time data about your blood sugar levels, and they’re typically used by people with Type 1 diabetes to manage their condition. But Nutrisense and other companies like Levels and January are proposing that nondiabetics can use blood sugar data to lose weight, optimize fitness gains, and improve their overall metabolic health. Of course, these startups still have a lot to prove. When The Verge looked into these devices last year, it was unclear whether CGMs were effective for people without diabetes, especially when it came to goals like weight loss.

But I happen to be the sort of person that companies like Nutrisense are trying to court. I don’t have diabetes, I eat well, and I exercise often. However, my family history and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) diagnosis put me at a heightened risk of diabetes. My doctors say losing weight will help with the metabolic symptoms associated with PCOS. Fueling properly for races and workouts has always been a struggle for me. On top of real-time glucose monitoring, Nutrisense also pairs you with a dietician to make sense of your results. On paper, the math adds up to me potentially benefiting from CGM use — even if the evidence isn’t fully there yet.

Ultimately, I gritted my teeth and jammed a needle-bearing sensor into my arm.

How it works, setup, and removal

Because CGMs require a prescription, you have to take a questionnaire to see whether you’re eligible to use Nutrisense. If you are, a Nutrisense doctor will issue your prescription. After, you get sent a kit containing Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre CGM and two bandages. Separately, you download the Nutrisense app and then follow a series of helpful video tutorials that walk you through assembling the applicator and “installing” the CGM sensor on your body. When that’s done, you slap the bandage over the CGM and hover your phone near the sensor to take your first measurement. It uses NFC, so it’s the same motion as using your phone to pay for something at the store, just on the back of your arm.

For the first day, the sensor needs to be calibrated. Afterward, you’re encouraged to log your meals and exercises so you can directly see how they impact your blood glucose levels. The sensor only retains about eight hours’ worth of information, so you’ll have to scan at least three times a day to ensure you don’t lose data. (This can be annoying, and I did lose a few hours here and there.) After 14 days, you replace the CGM and start all over again. For the first month, Nutrisense gives you complimentary access to a nutritionist who’ll review your data, point out trends, and answer any questions you might have. (After that first month, it’ll cost you $100 extra per month.)

This is easy to write out after the fact, but I was sweatin’ during the entire setup process. Unlike a noninvasive device like Lumen, which claims to measure your metabolism via your breath, CGMs pierce your skin with a small, thin needle. The CGM Nutrisense uses is no exception, and I hate needles the way Indiana Jones hates snakes. (I’m frankly not sure how I sat through three tattoos without fainting.) It doesn’t help that the applicator makes loud noises as you assemble it and contains a visible needle.

So I was shocked when I truly felt nothing as the needle went in. The sound of the applicator was more frightening than the actual motion of jamming the applicator into my arm. Both the covid-19 jab and the flu shot are exponentially more painful. This is likely because you insert the CGM into the fattiest part of your underarm, whereas a vaccine goes straight into muscle.

I was most nervous about placing the CGM, but it was actually harder to remove at the end of my 14 days. There were no official instructions for this part, so I just... pulled it off. What made it hard was that the bandage Nutrisense gives you is quite strong, and I had trouble ripping it off my skin. Afterward, I had adhesive residue on my arm for two days even though I scrubbed real hard in the shower. You can also see trace amounts of dried blood on the used CGM, and there was a small puncture mark on my arm. It healed within a day, but Nutrisense recommends rotating arms to give your skin a couple of weeks to recover.

All about glucose

Using Nutrisense is similar to food logging. You’re supposed to scan the sensor a few times a day and log all your food and exercise. Scanning brings up a squiggly line of your blood sugar levels, and your meals / workouts are represented by red dots on that line. Other factors, like sleep, are shown as blue dots. Nutrisense interprets your data in two buckets. First, there’s your glucose data, and second, there’s your nutritional data. For you to get the most out of it, you really do have to be diligent about logging your meals.

I hate long-term food tracking. While keeping an eye on macros can be helpful and insightful for training and weight loss, no app I’ve ever tested does a good job of making this convenient. Nutrisense isn’t an exception, though it’s one of the better implementations I’ve seen in recent years. On top of searching a database or scanning barcodes like other calorie-tracking apps, you can write out a description or snap a picture of your meal. Nutrisense’s AI will then populate your log with those items. It’s not perfect — the AI will get ingredients wrong, and you’ll have to fix it manually. But it gives you a starting place. I was also impressed with the support for international foods. I could log gimbap, tteokbokki, and Indian takeout with relative ease. That isn’t always the case.

Scanning and logging are the easy parts. Interpreting the data, however, comes with a learning curve. For blood glucose, there’s the self-explanatory daily average and a more complicated Daily Glucose Score. The latter comprises your highest daily glucose value, average value, adaptability (time spent above your glucose threshold), and variability (how intensely your glucose “swings”). I wish that were it, but there’s more. In the app’s Insights tab, you’ll find other values, like how long you spent within the ideal range, variability, average, min, max, sleep average, and morning average.

Each metric is color-graded. Green is good, orange is okay, and red indicates areas of improvement. According to Nutrisense, you want to stay within 70 to 140 milligrams per deciliter 95 to 100 percent of the time. You also want your variability to stay under 14mg/dL and for your morning and sleeping glucose averages to be between 70 and 105mg/dL.

Meanwhile, everything you eat is given an overall Meal Score that’s made up of four metrics: peak, exposure, stability, and recovery. Peak is your highest glucose value within two hours of eating; exposure is how strong your glucose response was; stability measures the highest versus lowest values within a two-hour eating window; and recovery is how close you get to your premeal levels after two hours. Nutrisense uses the same color-based grading system here, too.

Nutrisense has a crap ton of educational material within the app to explain all of this in further detail. I went through about two hours of it and barely scratched the surface. At the end of the day, I relied mainly on the colored grading scheme and would read descriptions to remind myself what each submetric was and why it mattered.

Ultimately, I didn’t learn a ton of new things about my blood sugar and eating habits, but I appreciated having visual confirmation. I know that I get cranky and sleepy if my blood sugar is low, but it’s vindicating to see the connection represented on a graph. I don’t need a CGM to tell me that tteokbokki — a dish that’s 90 percent rice cake — will spike my glucose levels, so I should probably have a protein along with it. It was more interesting to see how the same meal eaten at different times of day could induce different responses. For instance, my nutritionist pointed out that a helping of butter chicken curry produced a less intense spike when I ate it for lunch versus a late-night dinner. Perhaps the most fascinating thing to me was how my glucose skyrocketed right after a hard run — which makes sense because your body releases glycogen to fuel that kind of exercise. Conversely, a strength training session registered as a relatively flat line.

Nutrisense encourages experiments like these. That could be a lot of fun! Especially if your knowledge of nutritional science can be summed up as “low-carb diets are popular for weight loss.” But if you’re already familiar with all of this, it’s less exciting. More of a “huh, would you look at that” than an “oh wow, this is blowing my mind!”

Case in point, my two weeks with Nutrisense indicated I was already doing everything right — which was then confirmed by my nutritionist. My average glucose score was 99. They told me my baseline glucose trends were well within the optimum range of 70–90mg/dL, my highest spike never breached 140mg/dL, and I had “excellent glycemic variability” with an average of 11mg/dL. That was nice to hear considering I ate worse and exercised less than usual in those two weeks. Still, it was neat to have someone interpret the data and be on hand to answer questions.

But the bottom line was there wasn’t much for me to improve. My glucose minimum was the only metric in orange because I skipped a few meals, and I had none in the red zone. If I weren’t a reviewer, my two-week experiment would’ve cost me several hundred dollars to learn I’m already managing alright.

Accessibility is the biggest issue

My biggest problem with Nutrisense is that it takes a certain income level just to try it out.

My eyes nearly popped out of their sockets like the Tex Avery wolf when I saw how much Nutrisense costs. It’s $399 for the no-commitment one-month plan, $299 monthly for the three-month plan, $250 monthly for the six-month plan, and $225 monthly for a 12-month plan. As mentioned earlier, all plans get you a free month of nutritionist support, but you’ll have to tack on $100 monthly after that. There’s no option for a free trial, and once your plan ends, it’ll automatically renew on a month-to-month basis unless you pause or cancel. At a minimum, you’re looking at $2,700 annually on the 12-month plan or $3,800 if you shell out for the nutritionist support. Personally speaking, I wouldn’t have been able to afford this experience if I weren’t a reviewer — there’s no free trial for most people.

That’s a lotta moola, though the bulk of the cost is the CGM itself. According to Nutrisense’s FAQ page, the CGM it uses is not covered by any insurance companies, though you can use an HSA or FSA to help with the cost. To be fair, other CGM startups are similarly priced, but that simply underscores that, at the moment, this is an incredibly niche product.

From my own experience as a wearables reviewer and someone with PCOS, that’s so frustrating. Behavioral change is hard, losing weight is hard, and managing chronic conditions is really hard. We won’t have a better idea if CGM programs like Nutrisense are effective for nondiabetics if they aren’t used by a wider population. But realistically speaking, I don’t think the average person would pay this much and scan multiple times a day for several weeks or months without at least some expectation of capital-R results. What’s more likely is all that effort, time, and money helps you learn a little bit more about yourself, and you may see some results over an extended timeframe. Even then, there’s no guarantee it will give you the solution you’re looking for. Is that worth the price of entry?

If you have the means to try Nutrisense, I’m not going to stop you. Emerging tech is, by definition, unproven, but sometimes you just don’t question why something works for you. I firmly believe it’s your right to figure out what that thing is. But as with Lumen, I would say you should go in with tempered expectations. I was hoping to find out something I didn’t already know or had overlooked. What I got was an underwhelming but sobering reminder that there’s no magic bullet for chronic conditions.