I Tested the Apple Watch's New Heart Rate Sensor to See If It's Really Better Than Garmin's
Apple caught my attention with their claim that the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 have the “most accurate heart rate in a wearable.” It’s hard to make a really accurate heart rate sensor, and in my experience, Apple hasn’t had a great track record in that area. So I tested the Series 12 pretty intensively over the past week or so, and now I have results. Apple Watch Series 12 (GPS, 42mm) $399.00 at Amazon Get Deal Get Deal $399.00 at Amazon I’m picky about accuracy; longtime readers have seen me test watch after watch against my trusty chest strap to find out how good each one really is.
- ▪Apple caught my attention with their claim that the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 have the “most accurate heart rate in a wearable.” It’s hard to make a really accurate heart rate sensor, and in my experience, Apple hasn’t had a great t
- ▪So I tested the Series 12 pretty intensively over the past week or so, and now I have results.
- ▪Apple Watch Series 12 (GPS, 42mm) $399.00 at Amazon Get Deal Get Deal $399.00 at Amazon I’m picky about accuracy; longtime readers have seen me test watch after watch against my trusty chest strap to find out how good each one really is.
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| Original publisher | Lifehacker |
| Canonical URL | https://lifehacker.com/health/how-the-new-apple-watch-heart-rate-sensor-compares-to-garmin?utm_medium=RSS |
| Publication time | Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:20:46 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-24T21:40:26.579Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-24T21:40:26.579Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | XIrHaYTUsKmJ · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Apple caught my attention with their claim that the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 have the “most accurate heart rate in a wearable.” It’s hard to make a really accurate heart rate sensor, and in my experience, Apple hasn’t had a great track record in that area. So I tested the Series 12 pretty intensively over the past week or so, and now I have results. Apple Watch Series 12 (GPS, 42mm) $399.00 at Amazon Get Deal Get Deal $399.00 at Amazon I’m picky about accuracy; longtime readers have seen me test watch after watch against my trusty chest strap to find out how good each one really is. That sometimes brings surprises: The Powerbeats Pro 2 are surprisingly bad at heart rate tracking if you have small ears, for example.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lifehacker.
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