> if the silly cellular plan wasn't such a JOKE ($15/month to share my already $60 plan???), I'd enable that and not need to carry my phone for emergencies on hikes/bike rides, etc.

I'm replacing my old Apple Watch without cellular soon with one with cellular, and since my carrier (T-Mobile Connect) did not have any watch support I looked around to see what my options were.

I ended up switching to Verizon Visible. They have two phone plans, Visible for $25/month and Visible+ for $45/month, but frequent promotions or coupons often knock those down by up to $10/month for a year or two. The $45/month plan includes watch support, which is a $10/month add-on to the $25/month plan.

Better than promo codes is they offer annual billing at $275/year for Visible and $395/year for Visible+. Those work out to $22.92/month and 32.92/month, respectively, which means if you are willing to pay annually and want watch support there is no reason to get plain Visible instead of Visible+.

One potential issue with an MVNO like Visible, even when that MVNO is owned by the major carrier whose network they are on, is that their data may be deprioritized first if the underlying network is congested.

Visible+ includes some premium data that is treated exactly the same as Verizon's own traffic. You get unlimited premium data when on 5G Ultra Wideband, and 50 GB/month premium data on 5G and 4G LTE.

If you are fine with those data limits, want a watch on your plan, and don't travel outside the US, Canada, Mexico, the US Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico for more than one day a month (or don't mind having to pay extra for talk/text/data when you do leave those places for more than a day) then Visible+ paid annually was the best deal I could find.

I do like T-Mobile for their 5GB free/included international data (and unlimited texting).

The other concern I’ve read about with MVNOs is that some people were unable to transfer their number out. Don’t really want to lose my number.

The other thing with MVNO is that they have no or limited roaming.

It's often not a huge deal, but in sparser areas, it starts to matter a bit, at least if you are concerned with coverage.

What's the value of something like Athlytic/Whoops against just sticking to a routine?

Routine is Step 1, you're right. But for training, seeing things like HRV, resting heart rate, etc. allow you to optimize your training for the day based on your recovery/sleep.

I used Athlytic for a bit, but didn't find it that useful. Ultimately I figured I could just read HRV and RHR from the Health app to optimize training.

Shame on me for not knowing it was already there..