People are getting hung up on battery life.
You have to realize Apple is creating the equivalent of the luxury Mercedes G-Wagon for off-roading, when in reality a Jeep Rubicon (Garmin) addresses all of your real needs at 1/3 the price.
You have to realize Apple is creating the equivalent of the luxury Mercedes G-Wagon for off-roading, when in reality a Jeep Rubicon (Garmin) addresses all of your real needs at 1/3 the price.
It's infuriating that such an expensive watch will be unable to do some basic feature because they want to sell a "golf" version of the watch or a "sailing" version and so on.
They'll also release some feature that clearly is possible to implement on even current products elsewhere in the lineup - and isn't even really implemented on the watch at all but just some processing done on their cloud. But you don't get the feature, even if you bought a current model elsewhere in the lineup, because only the new watches get it.
With increased competition, supply chain issues, and consumer spending tightening it's been amusing to see Garmin suddenly drop much of that; the Vivoactive 4 and Forerunner 255 are absent most of their typical segmentation crap. The Forerunner 255 is a running watch that supports cycling power meters, for example, which had been a feature that had been limited to their absurdly expensive, huge, gaudy-looking "Fenix" watches.
It seems like Garmin is missing out on an opportunity to upsell existing device owners on apps. Like if someone sails occasionally then they're probably not going to spend $800 for another smart watch with sailing features, but they might spend $20 to add the sailing app to their existing device.
Meanwhile Apple's competition is flailing around releasing literally hundreds of minor model variations each, which all require design, parts sourcing, warehousing, warranty support[1], standards licensing, FCC approvals, etc...
Remember Nokia? They had something like over 100 phone models when Apple release the iPhone!
More models isn't more choice. It's more confusion, more fragmentation, more overhead, and more upset customers that can't get the combination of features they want.
[1] This one in particular is a killer, especially in some markets like California and Australia. Needing to keep spares on hand for legally-mandated warranty drags down the profitability or jacks up the price for a lot of companies that don't "get" the Apple Way of having fewer SKUs.
Garmin is targeting the actual market of consumers who are going deep outdoors. Apple is targeting the much bigger market of everyone else.
I'm an occasional outdoors person. A device with most of the Garmin features that is also a really good smartwatch for the everyday, which is 90% of my time, does appeal. A Garmin would collect dust for most of the year.