Apple Watch vs Garmin Watch: Skiing Features Compared!

Many people track their ski (or snowboard) trips with their watches. They do so in all manner of sports profiles, from running to cycling to skiing. However, for both watches, there are features and apps that are catered specifically to skiing/snowboarding, that track things like number of runs, total descent, chairlift time, and even how you compare to your friends.

For this post, I’m specifically focused on downhill skiing/snowboarding. I’m going to call it ‘skiing’ from here on out, because that’s what I did. But there’s absolutely no difference between the two sports profiles from a watch/app perspective. Both track regardless of whether you’re on one board or two.

Now, from a watch perspective, at a high level, the Garmin watches have built-in features for skiing/snowboarding. Whereas the Apple Watch doesn’t have any built-in features, and you’ll need to use a 3rd party app that can run on the watch. I went with ‘Slopes’, as it seemed to have the clearest website in terms of Apple Watch features (I also briefly tried Snoww). Slopes has both a free version that covers everything you realistically need, and a paid version with extra features ($29/year, or $49 for a family pass with five people). It offers a 7-day trial of the paid features though, which might cover some ski vacations. A friend skiing with us had the free version, and from an on-hill standpoint, it’s basically identical to the paid version. Most of the paid features are around post-skiing analysis.

Finally, from a Garmin watch standpoint, most of their watches with barometric altimeters have skiing/snowboarding modes. Garmin has tweaked the ski mode a bit from last spring (2023) in terms of how it tracks chairlift time. Much older models don’t have those firmware update tweaks, whereas newer models do. I’m just going to show how all the newer models. Practically speaking you probably won’t notice either way.

#Skiing #AppleWatch #Garmin