By Design
Eight Hundred Dollars Buys a Titanium Case for a Cartoon Beagle
It costs a good deal more than peanuts, and the Peanuts are the only reason to pay it.
By Hollis Carver Domestic Affairs · By Design 2026-10-03
The only reason to buy the Apple Watch Ultra 4 is the Snoopy face, and it wins hands down, mostly because he will not leave them alone. Snoopy and Woodstock carry on all over the dial, all day, and on Sundays the background goes full funny pages. It is cool. You will check the time far more often than you need to, purely to see what the dog is up to, and for a watch that is a job well done. Good grief, it works.
The rest of the watch gives you paws. There is still no blood pressure sensor, so no pressure there. There is no glucose sensor either, and this desk will not sugar-coat it. It has a temperature sensor and cannot take your temperature, which is a fever dream. No new sensor turned up at all: the heart sensors were touched up, and the screen and the case are the ones you have already seen. What is there keeps the watch useful once you have stopped staring at the beagle.
Can you turn the microphone off? Not really. There are three of them and no switch, only four separate settings for the features that listen in, which is a lot of small talk for a watch. And speaking of small: who in the hell wants to read messages on a screen 33 millimetres wide? It will not work without an iPhone, so every message is already in your pocket at a size meant for eyes. Reading it off your arm instead is wrist-y business.
The value is all in the dog. The sensors earn their keep. As a way to use a computer it is a dog’s breakfast, and at $799 everything except Snoopy is second hand.
Specifications and settings are from Apple’s own pages for the Ultra 4. Nothing was measured.
