Something’s Wrong With Apple’s New Sleep Score
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Apple’s new Sleep Score feature , now available on Apple Watch and in the Apple Health app, rates your sleep quality on a scale from 0 to 100. Because the score is retrospective, I can compare my sleep results over the past month (or even year) with those of Oura and other wearables. I tried this method, and one thing immediately stood out: Apple is being too lenient with me.
Just kidding, really. Yes, Apple’s scores are consistently higher than what I get from other wearables, but I can’t definitively say that Apple is wrong and Oura is right. I think of sleep grading like an essay grade: a bad essay will probably get a bad grade, and a good one will get a good grade, but not every teacher in the world will agree that your understanding of Moby-Dick’s symbolism deserves exactly a 92%. You might think you got away with something if your essay is returned mid-paper with an A+, but as long as the teacher sticks to their grading system, you can’t say your grade was wrong .
That’s why, in my opinion, the accuracy of sleep assessments isn’t all that important. The World Sleep Society more or less agrees, recommending not putting too much emphasis on individual assessments and instead monitoring trends, such as whether your sleep is improving or deteriorating over time.
How do Apple’s sleep metrics compare to Oura, Garmin, and Whoop?
With all that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to compare my Apple sleep scores over the past month with those I get from my Oura ring, as well as a few data points from my Garmin and Whoop devices.
Apple calculates your sleep score based on your sleep duration, bedtime regularity, and whether you wake up. Competing devices have their own algorithms. Apple can calculate the score based on data from any device, not just the Apple Watch, so in some cases, Oura and Apple scores actually use the same underlying data.
Here are the results:
Apple reports that over the past month, my sleep has been rated “excellent” for 17 consecutive nights. I’ve also received a “high” rating for 10 nights: only one night was “okay,” one was “poor,” and none were “very poor.”
My main conclusion is that Apple’s ratings are almost always higher than those of other devices. However, they tend to rise when other devices rise, and fall when other devices fall. This means that all these ratings are probably useful when considered as a whole.
Subjectively, I feel like I haven’t been sleeping very well lately. I go to bed later than I’d like and wake up tired more often. I’d say I sleep okay most of the time, sometimes badly, sometimes well. But that’s just my opinion, man.
Yes, my health is probably fine, and I don’t think my sleep is catastrophically bad, so maybe Apple’s rosy predictions are just the best way to assess my sleep. Sometimes it’s okay to be an excellent student.