'Similar' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Competing products with that kind of battery life offer far fewer features and lack the app ecosystem of the Apple Watch. That might work for some, but it's a dealbreaker for me. As a runner, a Garmin might seem like the perfect choice, but it lacks many features I've come to rely on with the Apple Watch.
Which features specifically? There are a lot of features that are built in to Garmin devices so they generally have less need of additional apps. But there is a rich ecosystem of apps as well.
One feature is heart rate and sleep tracking accuracy.
The Quantified Scientist on Youtube has ever-updated charts in pretty much any of his videos that investigate the accuracy of a given health tracker wearable.
Check out the chapter titles with "Comparison w/ other watches" to see charts for heart rate accuracy and sleep accuracy across different product lines. Apple Watch is best in class (e.g. 99% convergence with Polar chest strap).
Yes, that seems to be consistent with the test results from DC Rainmaker. The Apple optical HR sensor is marginally better than Garmin in a few limited scenarios. So a win for Apple there and very technically impressive, although the difference would only tend to show up intermittently during certain intense activities. Serious athletes who really care about accurate heart rate will usually use a separate chest sensor as there are inherent limits to what an optical wrist sensor can do, especially if the wearer's skin is darker or tattooed or dirty.
Kind of grasping at straws to require 99.99% accuracy. At that point a Polar chest strap is better. Olympians use Garmin watches all the time and the heart tracking is pretty great in most of their more expensive watches.
Well, there's also sleep time accuracy and sleep stage accuracy. What about those?
And the whole point is that you don't need to wear a Polar chest strap and a bunch of sleep lab electrodes to get good results. We're talking about something you get to wear on your wrist that takes calls and does all sorts of things.
The apps I use aren't available on Garmin, like Overcast for podcasts. I haven’t found an email client, which I use every morning, and I doubt any of the available options would sync properly with my email services. I rely on OmniFocus for GTD, but it isn’t supported by Garmin; at best, you can get to-do notifications sent to the watch, which isn’t what I need. Zoom doesn't seem to be supported either, and I occasionally join meetings from my watch when I'm just listening in.
There also don’t appear to be any Mastodon or Instagram apps, or at least none that I've noticed. My recipe manager has a watch app that guides me through the steps, provides ingredient lists, and sets timers at each stage — nothing like that exists for Garmin. My strength training app includes demonstration videos on the watch, which I don't see on Garmin. My diet tracking app isn't supported, and I haven’t found anything comparable. Adding things like an Amtrak ticket to a Garmin seems complicated, and I've read mixed reports about how well it scans QR codes.
Overall, while Garmin excels at fitness tracking, it lacks many of the features and apps I've come to depend on.
I don’t care about random generic podcast apps, I want the podcast app that I use. Also the strength training animations are generally crap. I use a specific strength training app because it gives good videos on the watch.
Went diving last vacation and my Ultra 2 turned into an excellent dive computer (after paying $10 for one month of the corresponding app). The equivalent watch from Garmin is much more expensive.
But the "cheaper models" are still more expensive than what is Apple's Top Model. Which excels at my main usage scenario (being a smartwatch) and also superbly supports various secondary activities (like diving).
And, by the way, having to decide from all those models is not exactly a selling point. I am not primarily a diver, a skier, a runner, a hiker or a biker - but I occasionally do all of those.
With superb integration in the Apple ecosystem, apps for everything and cheaper prices for top hardware, Apple watch is the perfect default choice. It's Garmin's burden to convince me to switch and they are not succeeding.
While I get the concerns about battery life, like most things in tech it's about weighing different tradeoffs against each other. Battery life, ecosystem, quality of sensors, app availability, resale value, etc.
I already have daily habits around charging, so that doesn't bother me, and if I'm traveling I can either bring a charger or put the watch in low power mode where it lasts a surprisingly long time.
My Apple watch purchase was basically for one feature. Fall detection, and automatic 911 calling. I bought the watch when I had a close call with a car while riding my bike to work, and wanted to make sure in case of an accident, I'd at least probably die in the ambulance and not on the side of the road :)
Let me get this straight: your evening routine has no margin for 10 minute parallelizable tasks, yet you’re commenting sarcastically about supposed chores in my life? In order to defend doing the same but every 3 days instead?
