Technologies

Apple Watch vs. Oura Ring: After Months of Testing, I’ve Finally Made My Choice

The one feature that tipped the scales for me in the Apple Watch vs. Oura Ring debate might not be a dealbreaker for everyone.

I’ve spent months wearing the Oura Ring and the Apple Watch simultaneously, and as an indecisive, overanalyzing wearable reviewer, I’m finally ready to tackle the existential question: smart ring versus smartwatch. But I’m going to do it in the most diplomatic, overly thorough way possible, because the «right» choice really depends on what you care about.

The more time I’ve spent wearing both, the clearer it’s become that these two wearables aren’t direct competitors so much as complements. They live under the same wearable-health umbrella, but are completely different flavors in both form and function.

They’re also expensive. At around $500 for the Oura Ring 4 and roughly $400 for the Apple Watch Series 11, buying both isn’t realistic for most people. So instead of crowning a universal winner, it makes more sense to break down what each one does best and who each would serve better.

Thanks largely to consumer wearables, we can now track incredibly specific health data that, until recently, just wasn’t accessible outside of clinical settings. Because these devices are designed to be worn every day, they can surface long-term trends and help us draw meaningful connections between our habits and how our bodies actually respond.

Smartwatches, fitness bands, smart rings and even newer form factors like smart shoes are all different ways to collect health and fitness data. They’re essentially trying to solve the same problem, just from different angles. And while there’s no single «holy grail» wearable that does everything perfectly yet, those various flavors exist for a reason — each prioritizes a different aspect of health, fitness or daily life.

The loud multitasker vs. the demure overachiever

The Apple Watch and Oura Ring track many of the same health metrics, but having a screen allows the Apple Watch to do a lot more (for better or worse). It’s essentially a pared-down version of your iPhone (minus the doomscrolling). It can handle notifications, calls, mobile payments, finding your phone and, yes, telling time. It’s also one of my favorite workout buddies because I view and use the live metrics to push myself during exercise.

But all that information makes it an in-your-face kind of wearable. It vibrates. It buzzes. It constantly wants your attention. And if you don’t charge it daily, it’s dead to the world. That means there are plenty of moments when it’s off your wrist and not collecting data, especially at night, when I’m more likely to forget it on the charger or just not want to wear a watch to bed.

The Oura Ring is the complete opposite. It’s demure. It’s quiet. And honestly, it’s mostly «dumb» jewelry without the phone app. You might not even hear from it for a full week until it needs a charge. Most of the time, I genuinely forget I’m wearing it. And when you do finally hear from it, it’s probably because your body needs attention.

Because it fades into the background, it stays on your body a lot more, and that consistency is everything when it comes to long-term health tracking.

Long-term health: Where the Oura ring really shines

Oura builds a baseline of your body’s status quo over time, so when something deviates, it’s immediately obvious. The app does a great job of connecting the dots and explaining what that data actually means, whether it’s early signs of illness, assessing energy levels for training or detecting subtle changes across the menstrual cycle.

When my readiness score dips, it almost always means I’m about to get sick or already fighting something. The app doesn’t just show the evidence (multiple health metrics trending off), it goes a step further by recommending a game plan: taking a rest day and putting the ring into Rest Mode, which pauses activity goals until you recover. That nudge has forced me to take rest days when I probably would’ve pushed through otherwise, just delaying my recovery.

There is a catch, though. To unlock that deeper analysis, Oura requires a $6 monthly subscription. Without it, you’ll still see the headline scores, but much of the context —the «why» behind those numbers— lives behind a paywall. Apple, by contrast, doesn’t charge a subscription for any of its health data.

The same is true for temperature and menstrual cycle tracking. You still log your period manually, but the way the Oura app charts temperature variations makes it easy to pinpoint the exact day ovulation occurs, marked by a sudden rise in basal body temperature. Seeing this mapped out has made me more aware of how hormonal changes affect my body beyond just my usual PMS. That «random» bloating and headache in the middle of a cycle? Ovulation.

The Apple Watch offers retroactive ovulation tracking too, but it requires very consistent sleepwear, which isn’t always realistic. Even when the data is there, it’s harder to connect the dots in the moment.

That’s the broader pattern with Apple’s health features. Many of the same metrics are available in the Health app, but they’re mostly presented as standalone data points. The Vitals app comes closest to tying things together by grouping heart rate, breathing rate, sleep, and temperature and flagging when something’s off. But it requires several consecutive nights of sleep tracking and stops short of telling you what to do with that information.

You can pause your move rings when you’re not feeling well, but there’s no prompt nudging you to take that rest day, so I haven’t given myself that luxury because it’s not a prompt like it is on the Oura ring.

The Apple Watch reigns for fitness tracking and day-to-day use

When it comes to daily habits that actually move the needle and improve that long-term health (aka fitness), the Oura Ring doesn’t even come close.

The Apple Watch is miles ahead when it comes to tracking workouts. Having your metrics in real time helps guide my workouts. I also use pace alerts, heart-rate zones and distance to push myself in the moment and get the most out of each session. Plus, it has a massive library of third-party apps to help you through each type of workout, whether it’s downloading offline trail maps or mapping your surf time to the tides app.

It also has safety features that can be genuinely life-saving, like fall detection, crash detection, location sharing and backtrack that helps you find your way back.

Oura tracks activity too, but only barely. It detects workouts automatically and surfaces them after the fact in the Oura app. You have to remember to manually confirm them to get credit. It’s fairly accurate at detecting my runs because my heart rate clearly peaks, but for lower-intensity workouts like Pilates, it often misses the mark. I get more activity credit for lugging laundry up my stairs or wrestling my kids into a sweater before we leave than for an actual session. You can also start a workout manually in the app, but there’s no live biometric data, and I rarely bother.

Bottom line: Which would I choose?

The Oura Ring wins at identifying long-term health trends and flagging subtle changes related to illness, recovery or cycle tracking. Its subtle design and week-long battery life mean it fades into the background, which makes consistency easy.

The Apple Watch shines in everyday life. It keeps you connected, doubles as a wallet, helps you find your phone and absolutely dominates fitness tracking.

If I had it my way, I’d wear the Apple Watch during the day and the Oura Ring at night. But if I were forced to pick just one, I’d choose the Apple Watch. At this stage in life, I’ll take anything that can offset the mental load of working full-time with three kids, even if it’s something as simple as helping me find my phone. Plus, I need all the help I can get to stay in shape. Fitness is my current priority, and it’s the foundation that helps keep all those longer-term health trends in check.

But this is just a stage for me, and I’m not setting my answer in stone. Your own season of life and priorities will ultimately shape which one makes the most sense for you.

Technologies

Amazon Speeds Up Delivery Even More With 1- and 3-Hour Options

The retailer says the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities, with discounted shipping for Prime members.

Same-day delivery apparently isn’t fast enough for some Amazon shoppers. The retail giant said on Tuesday it’s adding new shipping options that will get products to front doors within a one- or three-hour window.

The company said in its announcement that the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities across the US, while the three-hour option is now live in more than 2,000 areas. Amazon’s web page at amazon.com/getitfast shows whether those options are available to shoppers for their location. More than 90,000 products will be available for those shipping windows, the company said.

For those who can’t get those services (including the author of this post, who lives between Austin and San Antonio in Texas), a message will display: «3-hour delivery is currently unavailable. Check back at a later time or shop products with Same-Day delivery below.»

Pricing for the faster delivery options is not cheap: It’ll cost you $20 for one-hour delivery and $15 for three-hour delivery for those without an Amazon Prime account, or $10 and $5 for customers who subscribe to Prime.

Last year, the company rolled out faster Amazon delivery options to 4,000 additional areas.

In a video of the podcast Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, hosted by Amazon’s CEO of worldwide stores, Kandace Kapps, the director of the company’s same-day strategy team, spoke in more detail about the challenges of fast shipping. Kapps discussed shifts in customer buying habits over the last few years, such as more people buying household essentials like toilet paper on Amazon.

She said that Amazon can deliver so quickly by placing same-day delivery hubs close to customers in metro areas and by getting products ready to ship within 15 minutes, aided by warehouse robots.

«I think customers are going to continue to get magically surprised by how fast we can deliver to their doorstop,» Kapps said.

Herrington said fast shipping increases sales: «When we speed up the service, the probability that somebody buys a product from us goes up.»

Other retailers, including Walmart, have been adding same-day delivery options or exploring other ways to speed up shipping times to compete with Amazon.

Removing buyers’ moments of hesitation

Part of Amazon’s strategy, which has involved a massive buildout of locations, deployment of thousands of trucks, deals with other delivery services and investment in logistics software, is actually pretty simple: being there when people need last-minute items or make impulse buys.

«It’s about removing the last moment where you would’ve reconsidered the purchase,» said Stephanie Carls, retail insights expert at coupon and promotional-code website RetailMeNot, a sibling site of CNET. «It changes how you shop, not just how fast you get things.»

Carls said that Amazon’s super-fast delivery is removing the timeframe when people might change their minds about a purchase.

«There used to be a gap between deciding to buy something and actually having it. That’s when you’d price check, rethink it, or decide you didn’t need it after all,» she said. «This closes that gap.»

The retail expert said that competitors, including Walmart and Target, have been speeding up delivery times in some markets. Still, they’re not matching Amazon’s scale or product range at those speeds or levels of consistency.

«And that’s what starts to make everyone else feel slow,» Carls said. «Amazon’s advantage is how tightly connected its technology, inventory and delivery networks are, which makes this level of speed more repeatable.»

Technologies

Dog Health Goes Digital With New AI Chatbot

Fi Intelligence allows you to ask questions of a specially tailored pet health chatbot, but it’s not meant to replace vet visits.

It might be time to rethink what it means to be sick as a dog. On Tuesday, Fi, a smart pet technology company, announced a new AI-powered chatbot to help owners stay on top of their dog’s health using a blend of personal information and generalized dog breed data.

The AI agent, which the company is calling Fi Intelligence, is integrated directly into the Fi app. It has access to all the information gathered about your dog across the entire suite of Fi products, including the Fi Series 3 Plus and Fi Mini dog collars, as well as information and documents uploaded by the pet owner. The service is for dogs only (not cats, rabbits or other pets).

If you already own a Fi smart collar, existing data will be incorporated into the AI agent’s dataset to help it answer your questions.

When creating Fi Intelligence, the company identified a multitude of common questions that dog owners have, including whether their animal friend is walking or sleeping enough, or scratching more than usual. The chatbot was created to help owners find answers to these questions quickly and easily, according to Fi.

Fi designed its agent to answer these questions using a mix of general information about a dog’s breed, personal information and biometric data gathered by Fi smart pet collars.

Pet owners can ask the chatbot questions in plain English and get back detailed responses. Fi Intelligence is equipped to answer general questions, contrast your dog’s current data to previous time periods and compare your dog’s data to other dogs of the same breed.

Fi says its chatbot is different from general-purpose AI agents because it has been trained on a proprietary dataset containing «the largest repository of real-world canine activity, sleep and behavior data in the world.»

Fi Intelligence doesn’t replace a trip to the vet — and the company stresses it’s not supposed to. Rather, the agent is supposed to grant owners «informed confidence» about their dog’s health and can help them «show up [to the vet] with specific, documented observations drawn from weeks of continuous data.»

«The strongest signal from our beta was that owners aren’t using this to replace their vet,» said Fi’s Vice President of Product Darrell Stone. «They’re using it to show up better prepared.»

According to Fi, the Fi Intelligence integration will provide the most complete dog health profile available in the app so far. Fi Intelligence is available to all Fi members immediately.

Technologies

Nvidia Teases DLSS 5 and Gamers Aren’t Impressed

The new AI technology is making some big changes to video game graphics that hardly anyone seems to like.

Nvidia opened its GTC conference with a keynote by CEO Jensen Huang, revealing the company’s latest tech. Among the raft of the company’s AI developments, gamers were treated to the imminent version of its AI-powered upscaling and optimization technology, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), touted as the «biggest breakthrough in computer graphics».

Nvidia published a video illustrating how DLSS 5 can enhance graphics in Resident Evil Requiem, Starfield and other games, showing before-and-after takes. But gamers weren’t thrilled. In fact, the response to DLSS 5 resembles more of a collective backlash, replete with memes, ridicule and outrage.

Gamers were quick to point out that DLSS 5 transformed the original graphics into something vastly different. Some called the visuals «AI slop» because they look like «yassified» AI-generated filters.

Many worry that DLSS 5 could deviate from a creator’s specific artistic vision. Critics also fear that if this technology becomes the industry standard, video game graphics might start to look the same, losing their unique visual identity.

«Everything about this is a betrayal of these game’s artistry,» said YouTuber The Sphere Hunter in a post on X Monday. «Painting over handcrafted, intentional 3D art with shiny, wrinkly, sunken-in, porous, puckered, fraudulent, filtered nonsense is deeply disrespectful. If you want this, just watch gen-AI videos all day.»

Countless memes mocking the tech’s exaggerated features flooded the internet. Others on social media parodied the effects DLSS 5 could produce in other games.

Ok, you convinced us, NVIDIA DLSS 5 is coming to «Copycat» too 😅 pic.twitter.com/WT2qRRz9EC

— Copycat // OUT NOW 😻 (@GameCopycat) March 17, 2026

In a Q&A on Tuesday, Huang addressed the backlash from gamers, calling them «completely wrong.» Huang underlined that DLSS 5 «enhances and adds generative capability, but it doesn’t change the artistic control» and that «it’s in the direct control of the game developer.»

The team at Digital Foundry, which specializes in game technology and hardware reviews, called it «disruptive and transformative» but was generally positive about it, though they saw some hiccups.

«[The images] looked a little bit uncanny, I would say, but definitely the overall portrayal of those characters is much more sophisticated,» said Oliver Mackenzie, video producer and writer for Digital Foundry.

Bethesda’s official X account replied to comments from members of Digital Foundry about Starfield and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, both published by Bethesda.

«This is a very early look, and our art teams will be further adjusting the lighting and final effect to look the way we think works best for each game. This will all be under our artists’ control, and totally optional for players,» the publisher said.

DLSS 5 is set to be released sometime in the fall.

What is DLSS?

Nvidia first released its DLSS tech back in 2018 with its RTX 2080 card: The RTX architecture introduced the Tensor cores, which are essential for accelerating the calculations used by the DLSS AI. The deep learning technology was designed to upscale images and video from low resolution in real time to achieve higher frame rates.

Gamers weren’t impressed at first, but later versions of the technology did perform better in games that supported it. DLSS 4, released last year and tweaked to 4.5 as of January, made significant improvements to detail rendering, reducing motion artifacts, boosting frame rates, and generating more realistic lighting via path tracing (which incorporates interactions with ray-traced lighting).

What does DLSS 5 do?

DLSS 5 works a bit differently than previous versions of the technology. According to Nvidia, DLSS 5 shifts from processing simple pixels to understanding 3D elements. By deconstructing characters into specific components — such as skin, hair and clothing — the AI can render them more consistently. This results in faster performance and much more realistic details, especially for textures and lighting.

Game developers control how DLSS 5 enhances images and to what degree, ensuring it matches the game’s aesthetic. The demo video showcased some positive enhancements, but others looked like sweeping changes to the characters and the environment.

Which games will support DLSS 5 at launch?

On Monday, Nvidia released a list of games slated to support DLSS 5:

AION 2
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Black State
Cinder City
Delta Force
Hogwarts Legacy
Justice
Naraka: Bladepoint
NTE: Neverness to Everness
Phantom Blade Zero
Resident Evil Requiem
Sea of Remnants
Starfield
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
Where Winds Meet

What cards will support DLSS 5?

Nvidia has yet to provide a list of GPUs that will support the new technology. In an FAQ, the company says it will release a list of supported cards closer to its release.