Apple Watch Ultra seeks to beat Fitbit, Garmin

Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley discusses first impressions on some of Apple's newest tech announced Wednesday.

Video transcript

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AKIKO FUJITA: Well, fitness is in focus with Apple taking aim at professional athletes in the outdoors crowd with new products like a ruggedized watch and features like a satellite SOS service. But will it be enough to win over the Fitbit and Garmin crowds? For more on that, let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley, who's been all over this coverage for us out of Cupertino. I mean, I guess, Dan, you could kind of argue they've already won over the Fitbit and Garmin crowd, right?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah. I mean, you know, when it comes to-- I think, you know, endurance athletes, extreme sports athletes, people that are going hiking or running long distances, ultra marathoners, things like that, they're still using a lot of Garmin devices. And that's why Apple rolled out this new Apple Watch Ultra. It starts at $799. And, Akiko, as you said, it does have those features where, you know, if you are in the middle of nowhere, it can alert people via a-- I believe, 86 decibel siren. So it'll be able to reach people that are nearby if you fall down or take a tumble and you can't get to anyone.

It also has a red light mode. So if you're running in the darkness, it won't be too jarring for your eyes to view that. It won't project light very far. It also is more rugged than the standard Apple Watch. It's larger. It has a kind of cover on the display. Not necessarily a cover, but the edges of the bezel rise up so that you won't scratch the display if you're, you know, climbing Everest or something. And then, there are other features built in like dive sensors, things that can tell you the temperature of the water that you're in, what depth you're at. And in addition to that, there are new temperature sensors. And so the temperature sensor is going to be on this as well as the series 8.

One of the big things here outside of just fitness is health. And Apple is really positioning itself as both a health and fitness kind of go to device maker. And so with the series 8 and that temperature sensor, they're basically saying, look, we have the sensor underneath the watch and on top of the watch, and through that we'll be able to tell things like women's ovulation cycles, period tracking. And then, you know, if you knock a few back in-- before you go to bed, it'll be able to tell you that, you know, alcohol can impact your temperature as well. So a number of things that they're trying to work into this.

And obviously, we'll hopefully be able to see more developers get in there and see what they can do with the temperature. But don't expect it to do something like tell you if you have a fever, because you can't really use it on demand. It's something that kicks on at night while you're sleeping, and then checks your temperature. So really a number of new features. There's crash detection. So if you're in a car accident, it'll be able to tell if you've been in an accident and call the authorities, as well as your emergency contacts. So like I said, a lot of new features coming to these phones-- watches rather.

AKIKO FUJITA: OK. Certainly making the platform a little-- or Apple in general-- the iOS ecosystem stickier and a lot more data being collected there. Dan Howley, thanks so much for that.