If you spend upwards of $700 on a smartwatch, you expect it to do the basics well. If you’re looking to upgrade your watch and you’re trying to decide between the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and Garmin Forerunner 970, you’ve come to the right place. I drilled down into one of the most basic features there is on both watches to see which was more accurate — counting steps.
Of course, both watches do a heck of a lot more than count your steps. The new Apple Watch Ultra 3 is the ultimate adventure watch, and the best Apple Watch if you’re doing serious training.
The Apple Watch Ultra 3 brings satellite connectivity, 5G, and longer battery life to Apple’s most rugged smartwatch. With the brightest display of any Apple Watch, new health tools like hypertension alerts, and all the safety features Apple is known for, it’s the ultimate wearable for those who want the very best.
On the other hand, the Garmin Forerunner 970 is the best Garmin watch we’ve tested this year. Offering an upgraded design that’s more attractive and durable than the Forerunner 965, reliably accurate tracking, and detailed training insights that go beyond what we’ve seen before from a watch. It sets new standards and is the best of the best when it comes to a running watch.
But which was more accurate when it came to counting my steps? To find out more, I strapped both to my wrist and manually counted 10,000 steps. Read on to find out which came out on top.
Here's how I did the 10k steps challenge
For this test, I used my trusty $5 clicker tool from Amazon, and manually clicked each time I took a step. I wore both the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and Garmin Forerunner 970 on my left wrist, and held my clicker in the right. Both watches count your steps by using an internal accelerometer, which measures the swing of your arm.
Each swing counts for two steps. It doesn’t matter whether you wear your watch on your dominant or non-dominant hand, or whether you’re walking with your hands in your pockets, or holding something; the accelerometer should still measure your body’s movement.
As with all of the best Apple Watches, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 doesn’t tell you the number of steps you’ve taken during a specific workout; instead, you see an overall number of steps throughout the day.
You can see your overall steps for the entire day, but not how many steps you took on a particular walk (probably because steps aren’t actually that useful a metric). For this comparison, I downloaded a third-party Pedometer+ app onto my Apple Watch Ultra 3.
I split my 10,000 steps up into three different walks throughout the day. Here are the results:
Manual recording |
Apple Watch Ultra 3 |
Garmin Forerunner 970 |
|
Walk one |
5,410 steps |
5,376 steps |
5,440 steps |
Walk two |
3,348 steps |
3,365 steps |
3,386 steps |
Walk three |
2,034 steps |
2,001 steps |
2,118 steps |
Total |
10,792 steps |
10,742 steps |
10,944 steps |
The Apple Watch Ultra 3 was pretty much spot on when it came to counting my steps — only missing 50 steps, which over the course of 10,000 is pretty amazing.
As you can see from the results, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 was pretty much spot on when it came to counting my steps — only missing 50 steps, which over the course of 10,000 is pretty amazing.
That’s not to say the Garmin Forerunner 970 is inaccurate, of course, as it only overcounted 202 steps, which, considering the average person takes 2,000 steps per mile, is again a tiny number.
Of course, when it comes to choosing between the two watches, things get a little more complicated. Both watches are at a similar price point — $799 for the Apple Watch Ultra 3, and $749 for the Garmin Forerunner 970.
Both have bright displays, although which you prefer will be down to personal preference — as someone with relatively small wrists, I find the round design of the Forerunner 970 bezel more comfortable, especially when sleeping.
Both watches have loads of training metrics too — the Apple Watch Ultra 3 tracks tons of different sports modes, with customizable data screens, has that all-important Action Button, and has Apple’s new sleep score.
The Forerunner 970 has Garmin’s top-tier recovery features like Training Readiness and Body Battery; however, the watch introduces some new features with a running economy rating, step speed loss measurements, and running tolerance, which estimates the training load you can tolerate safely each week.
If you’re going off-grid, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 has dual-frequency GPS, whereas the Forerunner 970 has Garmin’s gold-standard multi-band GPS, which we’ve found to be highly accurate. Both have offline maps, but the Ultra 3 goes one step further with the built-in siren, 5G capabilities, and satellite navigation.
That said, if you are truly off-grid, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 has a battery life of 42 hours, whereas the typical battery life of the Garmin Forerunner 970 is up to 15 days.
Which should you choose?
We do a lot of these 10,000-step tests to compare watches, because its an interesting insight into how they'll perform against each other. But when it comes to complex adventure watches like these, you're probably going to be looking at the bigger picture.
I mean, if you just wanted to count your steps each day, then a fitness tracker could be a better alternative, since they're a lot cheaper and (generally) last longer between charges too.
So it's worth weighing up other factors. Most importantly, which ecosystem do you prefer? Garmin is the favored platform for runners, and while they used to blow the competition away with free features, the company has recently launched a paywalled service that locks away key insights.
But it's still a more performance-focused watch. The Apple Watch Ultra 3 is a fantastic choice if you already use an iPhone, but the core of the device is the same as the other Apple watches (which are significantly cheaper).
With the Ultra 3, you get a longer battery life, satellite connectivity and improved brightness, which are definitely huge improvements, but only if you actually plan to head out in conditions where these are needed.
So which you choose will depend on more than just its step performance. Though these 10k challenges highlight that, no matter what the companies say, they won't always be completely accurate all of the time.
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