Apple Watch Ultra durability test is hard to watch for all the right reasons
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Everything about the Apple Watch Ultra is bigger. It has a bigger and brighter screen than the Apple Watch 8, a bigger battery, bigger (and more) buttons, and it has a greater capacity to handle the rough world of outdoor activities.
It can also take a beating, or at least a series of blows, from a small sledgehammer. Spotted in a recent video by MacRumors, YouTuber TechRax (opens in new tab) joyfully crushes the new $799 / £849 / AU$1229 Apple Watch Ultra to pieces. It’s a rather unrealistic endurance test of the chunky 49mm wearable, but if you look from start to finish you’ll discover some hard (in a good way) Ultra truths.
It would be unfair to call the Apple Watch Ultra a ruggedized version of the Apple Watch 8 (or any generation for that matter). It’s not just any hardened exterior. It is a completely redesigned Apple Watch. At 49mm, it’s 5mm taller than the largest Apple Watch 8. Of course, it’s also heavier. The titanium case helps it to add 23 grams more compared to the aluminum 45 mm Apple Watch 8. The Ultra even weighs almost 10 grams heavier than the stainless steel Apple Watch 8.
Unlike the Apple Watch 8’s curved glass dial that blends seamlessly with the aluminum body, Apple has given the Ultra a no-nonsense, completely flat sapphire crystal display, surrounded by a sturdy titanium lip.
The watch looks and feels strong and apparently it is.
TechRax starts its test by dropping the watch from 1.2 meters high onto concrete, which, unsurprisingly, handles the Apple Watch Ultra well. Sure, there were some minor scratches on the titanium case, but I haven’t seen a scratch-resistant Apple product yet.
The tests continue in an equally less-than-scientific fashion, with TechRax dropping the Apple Watch (by now suspecting something was amiss) into a jar of screws and nails. TechRax then shook the jar, and the watch came out mostly unscathed, though the orange band got dirty.
Perhaps frustrated that he wasn’t getting anywhere, TechRax grabbed a small sledgehammer, placed the watch on an immaculate white table, and gave it three sharp whacks.
Nothing happened. No scratches. No cracks. No malfunctions.
It’s worth pausing here to think about what this could mean in the real world of Apple Watch Ultra usage.
Ultra strong
A while back I wore my Apple Watch 7 while cleaning out the crawl space. I was lifting heavy wood and other debris from what was essentially a pit filled with coarse sand and dirt. At one point my watch got stuck between a wooden support beam, some grit and a heavy beam in my hand. The Ion-X glass screen ended with a huge, unsightly gouge.
Based on what I’ve seen here in this video, I think the Apple Watch Ultra holds up significantly better under similar conditions or, say, when you’re climbing a mountain and your wrist hits the rock face.
However, TechRax was not satisfied. Then he hit the watch 12 more times. The table under the watch creaked, but the watch was unharmed. For the most part. Unfortunately, even without visible exterior damage, the Apple Watch Ultra stopped working.
That’s when TechRax went into town and banged the dial repeatedly until it shattered. He then turned the watch over and banged the sensor-filled back until it cracked, too.
With each hit, I cringed a little because TechRax unnecessarily ruined a perfectly good and normally very robust Apple Watch Ultra.
Perhaps TechRax walked away satisfied, but I was a little sad for the Watch Ultra, surviving what should have been the worst beating, only to have the sadist come back to it and beat the Watch into submission.
Potential Apple Watch Ultra consumers should infer an indisputable fact from this: this is a very strong smartwatch.
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