We may earn a commission from links on this page.
Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding my work at Lifehacker as a preferred source.
Apple’s new sleep score, now available on the Apple Watch and in the Apple Health app, grades how well you slept on a scale from 0 to 100. Since it grades you retroactively, I can look back at my last month (or even years) of sleep scores to see how the new numbers compare to the scores I’ve gotten from Oura and other wearables. I tried this out, and one thing stood out: Apple is way too easy on me.
I’m kidding, sort of. Yes, Apple’s scores are consistently higher than those I get from other wearables, but it’s not like I can definitively say Apple is wrong or Oura is right. I think of a sleep score like a grade on an essay: A bad essay will probably get a bad grade, and a good essay will probably get a good grade, but it’s not like every teacher in the world would agree that your take on Moby Dick’s symbolism deserves exactly a 92%. You may feel like you got away with something if your mid essay comes back with an A+, but as long as the prof is consistent with their grading scheme, you can’t say your grade was wrong.
That’s why the accuracy of sleep scores doesn’t matter a ton, in my opinion. The World Sleep Society more or less agrees, saying not to read too much into individual scores, but instead keep an eye on trends, like whether your sleep seems to be getting better or worse over time.
How Apple’s sleep scores measure up to Oura, Garmin, and Whoop
With all of that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to compare my last month or so of Apple sleep scores to those I get from the Oura ring, plus a few data points from my Garmin and Whoop devices.
Apple calculates your sleep score based on your sleep duration, bedtime consistency, and interruptions. Competing devices each have their own algorithm. Apple can calculate its score based on the data from any device, not just an Apple Watch, so in some cases the Oura and Apple scores are actually using the same underlying data.
Here are the results:
What do you think so far?
Apple is the red line at the top—usually grading me higher than its competitors.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki
Apple says that over the past month, my most frequent sleep score level is “excellent,” earned on 17 nights. I also had a “high” sleep score on 10 nights, with just one night of “OK” sleep, one of “low” sleep, and no nights “very low.”
My major takeaway is that Apple’s scores are almost always higher than those I get from other devices. That said, they tend to go up when the others go up, and down when the others go down, which means that all of these scores are probably useful when looked at from a big-picture point of view.
Subjectively, I don’t think my sleep has been all that good lately. I’ve been staying up late more often than I’d like, and waking up tired more often than not. I’d judge it as mostly OK, occasionally poor, and sometimes good. But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
It is true that there’s probably nothing medically wrong with me, and I don’t think my sleep is drastically poor—so maybe Apple’s rosy outlook is just a better way to think about my sleep. It’s OK to be a straight-A student sometimes.
