Apple Watch Ultra and Oura Ring Jason Hiner/ZDNETI’ve been wearing an Apple Watch every day for the past decade and I’ve been using it to track my sleep every night since 2019. Over the past few years, I’ve known more and more friends, family, and colleagues opting for smart rings instead of smart watches to track their health. I’ve also personally tested the Oura Ring, the Samsung Galaxy Ring, and the Ultrahuman Ring Air. But eventually, I keep taking off the rings and coming back to the Apple Watch as my sole health tracker.Also: I switched to the Apple Watch after a four-year hiatus – here’s why it’s near perfect nowThe funny thing is that I had quit wearing a watch for years before the Apple Watch arrived in 2015, preferring to just use my phone to keep track of the time. But during the past two years, I’ve been wearing the Apple Watch Ultra — the largest and most bulky watch in the lineup. So why do I prefer the Apple Watch to much smaller and more discreet smart rings? It comes down to three reasons. 1. ComfortDespite wearing the heavy Apple Watch Ultra while I sleep, I’ve gotten so accustomed to wearing an Apple Watch that I’m not very conscious of it when it’s on my wrist — either during the day or when I sleep. I can’t say the same for smart rings. The Oura Ring 4 and the Ultrahuman Ring Air are particularly bulky for rings and not very comfortable to wear when I’m sleeping. The Samsung Galaxy Ring is a little bit better because it’s thinner and lighter. It’s amazing how much technology is packed into these tiny rings, but I still find them a lot more noticeable and uncomfortable to wear compared to my wedding ring, for instance. Also: I compared the best smartwatches from Google and Apple – and there’s a clear winnerI’ll admit that it’s possible I’d get used to these rings over time the way I have with the Apple Watch, but I’ve worn smart rings for weeks and months at a time for testing and still found them distracting to wear to sleep and I always felt relieved to stop wearing them when I was done testing the ring.2. Glanceable info and quick actionsThe people I know who love smart rings often say that one of the things they appreciate is that the rings don’t have screens and so they are less distracting. However, I actually come at it from the other direction. There are multiple things the Apple Watch does to save me from pulling out my phone throughout every day. To be clear, I have set up the Apple Watch Ultra to do a lot. I use the Modular Ultra watchface and it has eight different complications you can set — plus I also use a Shortcut to customize the Action Button. So that gives me a total of nine things the Apple Watch Ultra can show and do: time, date, weather, battery life, activity, workout, mindfulness, hydration, and my custom Shortcut to pair heart tracking with the Supernatural workout app on Meta Quest. I also regularly catch important notifications on the Apple Watch that I likely would have missed on my phone. To be clear, I don’t get all of my notifications on the watch, but I have tuned the watch notification settings so that the most important ones ping my wrist. In other words, the Apple Watch does far more for me than just telling the time and tracking my activity. More