My cheap dumb watch requires battery change once in 4 years and counting.

> also find the reasoning in "Why track your sleep at all? If you’ve had a crap night, you’ll wake up tired." weird. That's the equivalent of saying "Why track your blood pressure at all? If you've had a problem with high blood pressure, you'll wake up with a stroke

These are not nearly comparable. If you have issue, regular blood pressure measurements mean you get more drugs if it is persistently up. It is not like being tired at all.

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hnkgnn 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

True but these examples illustrates how fitness watches' underlying value prop, their pitch, is to convince users to make it a daily lifestyle. There's a spectrum of practicality though: there's less reason to monitor blood pressure on a minute-by-minute basis, with graphs and trends and metrics, but an initial novelty wears off after a few weeks of monitoring sleep that way. It's cool and interesting at first, but hard to justify it as a constant lifestyle. Maybe insulin / glucose is interesting from a data-heavy perspective, but diabetics eventually gain an instinct for what meals spoke what and when, and start to lay off the data and metrics. The novelty wears off.

	▲	lukeschlather 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The heart-rate monitoring on my Garmin gives highly accurate tracking of calories burned, better than anything I could do by hand. Very valuable, I was able to lose 50 pounds and I was able to do minimal calorie counting. Basically I ate a very consistent weekly diet and used the watch to tell me if I had done enough exercise that I could eat something else. It's still very useful, I look at my calorie count regularly to guide how much extra to eat before and after activities. I've also found some of the other ML-powered derived metrics surprisingly useful. There's a "training status" that has "productive/maintaining/strained/recovery/detraining." When I've got a bad cold/flu/covid type illness it often says "strained" which I can feel in my body but it's nice to have that objective external metric of "yes, your body is not working right and you should take it easy." Similarly when I am working out it's nice to be able to look at my heart rate at a glance and know if I am over/under exerting myself.

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throw0101c 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Casio has just released W-221H watches that talk about 10 year battery life:

* https://www.casio.com/intl/watches/casio/product.W-221H-1AV/

If you're willing to spend a bit more, there are solar powered watches (digital and analog faces).

	▲	jazzyjackson 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Casio’s classic F91W often lasts more than 10 years, I guess they just didn’t want to advertise it til they could stand behind it. I really like my new F91W modded by CW&T, embedded in a brick of resin so there’s no buttons, no way to change the time, no changing the battery, just a watch that will tick for 10ish years and then die. https://cwandt.com/products/solid-state-watch Might as well use this comment to also share somebody stuffed an ARM processor into an F91W https://www.crowdsupply.com/oddly-specific-objects/sensor-wa...

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zeroCalories 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah I tried these health trackers for a while, but I got super irritated by having to plan around them. It's objectively not a big deal, but last time my Garmin died I just put it down and never picked it up again. Been living with a Casio on the wrist uninterrupted for years now, and whenever I think about trying on the Garmin again, I don't want to because I would need to charge it first. At least with a mechanical watch it's ready to go whenever.