Yes, the Apple Watch Ultra is huge. But its size comes with a lot of functional perks, beyond all the attention it draws to your wrist.

A watch has never really existed solely as a time keeping accessory. Wristwatches have featured calculators, micro televisions, operated as mobile gaming devices, guided adventurers with tacked on compasses and other way-finding markers, and have been combined with a multitude of other features miniaturized for the wrist. Even sans these accoutrements, the watch in itself has always operated as a statement of lifestyle, conveying as much about the wearer’s aspirations as its actual daily functions.
Smartwatches have always needed to deliver a more convincing reason for its anachronistic existence than their pre-digital counterparts. In the age of the smartphone, the watch became a dumb redundancy. Then in 2015, the Apple Watch arrived to stake claim to a still nascent wearable landscape. Apple envisions adventurers and competitive endurance athletes will most benefit from this new expression of the Apple Watch.
It was a time when the wearables category was a raging sea of promises touting innovation, but whose shores were littered with “coming soon” disappointment. This was partially due to the limitations of manufacturing and available technologies. But it was also that nobody ? Apple included ? had yet made a convincing case the smartwatch could match the functionalities already on our phones, let alone deliver ...