Having tested the Apple Watch Series 11 against my Oura Ring, I’m shocked by how little daylight is left between them. Apple’s new Sleep Scores finally make rich sleep tracking immediately actionable and it closes the watch right up against the ring’s frankly unfair head start in nightly insights.
That is an important matter, since the sleep problem is endemic. A majority of Americans are now saying that they’d feel better if they got more sleep, Gallup recently found. This increasing awareness has brought about a surge in trackers, but what people really want isn’t raw data; it’s context that guides better choices the following day. That’s where the Series 11 fills the gap.
Sleep scores that tell you more than how you slept
Apple’s Sleep Score tallies duration, bedtimes’ consistency, and interruptions into a 0–100 figure each morning. Behind the scenes, Apple says the algorithms were based on its Heart and Movement Study, which used more 5 million nights of data, and in line with recommendations from groups like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, National Sleep Foundation and the World Sleep Society.
In real life, the score uncannily reflected how I felt. Nights with multiple wake-ups from late-night notifications and a too-early alarm resulted in scores in the “fair” range; when I kept a consistent bedtime and swore off scrolling, I consistently rebounded back to “good.” The distinction isn’t merely one of numbers — it’s the clarity on what to fix tonight in order to feel better tomorrow morning.
Apple reinforces this with detailed stage charts, heart rate trends and — crucially — its FDA-cleared sleep apnea detection, which brings to light a serious, easily overlooked condition without a lab appointment. For several users, that alone is worth keeping the watch on overnight.
Where the watch now goes
There’s not a ring on the planet that can tie sleep to the rest of your day like the Series 11. Workout detection, effort metrics and heart rate sampling come together in a single on-wrist experience. When my Sleep Score dropped after a late run, the watch’s activity context was a clear indicator of why. That connection between daytime activity and night-time recovery is stronger here than with a ring-only configuration.
There’s also immediacy. A few gentle taps to wind down, on-screen coaching to hit a target bedtime and the ability to see trends without opening an app can make healthy habits feel less like homework. The sensor suite on the watch may live on the wrist rather than the finger, but Apple’s hardware-software integration, and the feedback loops in it, are more and more what It’s all about.
The last big frontier: stress tracking
Where Oura still takes the edge is daytime stress. (Market-researchy aside: This is the part I’m most excited about — re-imagining heart rate dynamics as an intuitive timeline with sliders from restored to stressed, so I, and now you, can scrub back to see what that tense meeting or crazy commute did to my and your physiology.) It’s almost like a living diary of my nervous system.
Apple might be recording the ingredients raw, the heart rate, heart rate variability and breathing, yet it — or anyone else — has not yet turned them into a minute-by-minute stress lens. While on a long, rough flight where I could feel my anxiety increasing, I was able to check my heart rate via my wrist in real time on the Series 11, but I wasn’t able to note that fact or see it in context compared to my baseline or my recovery window. I’ll take that stress interactive timeline, please, and, oh, can I get prompts to breathe or take a step back when those ##%$!!! graphs spike and that last moat shrinks!
Battery, comfort and cost calculus
The ring still kills it on sleep comfort and battery life when it comes to days between charge, however. The watch requests a daily top-up, so you have to add a charging routine — say, while showering or making coffee — if you want uninterrupted sleep tracking. You can make that work, but it’s something you have to develop a habit.
On the other hand, Apple doesn’t hide core health metrics behind an additional membership. Oura’s best insights, like quality of sleep and stress levels, are locked behind a subscription. If you have the right priorities, this watch’s up-front with no ongoing fee can be a cost-effective way to get serious sleep and health data.
What would finally end the ring
If Apple includes real stress visualization — a full interactive, time-stamped map translating heart and variability into easy-to-understand stress and recovery bands, with built-in journaling hooks and guided interventions — it will have an end-to-end loop: exercise, wind down, sleep, adapt. A simple morning readiness-style summary that combines Sleep Score with recovery cues would do it.
The Series 11 as it is now already provides the clarity drunken users need in practice to make those sleep improvements, combined with best-in-class integration and on-wrist convenience. For me, the Oura Ring is no longer the shit sitting on top of my nightstand buggy—all he does is accommodate (sex joke), instead, he’s become a specialist. With a single clever stress feature, the Apple Watch is now the only other tracker I use.