Garmin's –$40B Pivot
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I do think Garmin have found a really good balance for their devices in being smart but not "too smart". I have had a Vívoactive 3 for years that I am pretty happy with. Good battery life and does all the basic fitness stuff plus some actually useful extras like alerting me to phone notifications, etc.
Also interesting is that the phone never just replaced standalone GPS fitness trackers. It's entirely possible to just use your phone to track your run, though obviously there are downsides, like you don't get heart rate tracking and it's a lot bulkier (though I think most people probably run with their phone anyway).
Garmin's unwavering commitment to physical buttons and how you can customize what they do is what makes them the gold standard in this area for me.
Most people may be unaware that Garmin has a strong foothold in the stringently regulated avionics industry, in particular in flight instruments, displays, deck and others human-machine interface products. In turn, specific regulations informed by ergonomics research are unambiguous in prioritizing safety and unanimously contain minimum usability requirements.
As an example, an AC [1, Ch. 7] advises on (electronic display) control devices, and another AC [2] advises on design and evaluation of controls and displays. The software-defined counterparts have immensely harder requirements that must be satisfied, which, in my reading, is incompatible with pure touchscreen devices.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/advisory_circular/...
[2] https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/advisory_circular/...
Physical buttons, though... I've lost more than one bike ride because the start/stop button was bumped on the Forerunner and it turned out not to be recording.
I've had that happen to me during yoga and boxing workouts I've recorded. There's a way to lock the physical buttons (at least on my Instinct watch), which requires multiple presses to stop/start a workout. IIRC, it's by holding the light button.
It took a bit of work to get those converted to a modern format (load into ancient tool, which is still maintained, and write out as GPX files... one at a time). But then these GPX files can be uploaded to Strava and there they are! Activities older than Strava itself, fully integrated.
Also I've more than once had a "whoopsie" - app left recording during the drive home, for example. Download activity from Strava, edit the GPX file, delete the activity and re-upload from the file.
And when you download your stuff from Strava, you get a database dump. That's both good and bad; e.g. users are just numbers and you'd need to use the web Strava to translate them to names, but all your photos and all your traces and all your stats come down in standard formats (jpeg, gpx and csv respectively) and nothing is dumbed down; everything is in the best possible format for re-import to something else.
Everything goes into Apple Health but individual apps can barely talk to one another. Oura won’t pull heart rate data from Apple Health, so when I track my lifting workouts on my watch (a ring is a no-go for barbell work) it’s not there. Same for my Polar chest strap which I use during judo and BJJ. Oura is completely blind to this despite the data being available and it having access through Health.
Strava only pulls in workouts for apps that have been directly connected to it. So I have to have n:m connections between apps with this model, and only get sync between apps that have explicit Strava integration. For Garmin cycling workouts this works okay. When I integrate with Polar workouts, Strava insists on reduplicating the data back into Apple Health a second time. I have yet to find a way to get the data into Strava but have it recorded once instead sold zero times or twice.
Garmin directly refuses to use anything not recorded from their own devices. It won’t import sleep from my Oura or Withings trackers, heart rate from anything else, etc. Want to use any of the derived metrics in their app? Sorry, you'll need to exclusively use Garmin devices for everything in order to have all that data in place.
The only thing that isn’t a complete shitshow in this entire ecosystem is Apple Health.
Oura's first Ring was released the same year as the Watch, so I don't think that Oura was given early access.
If recorded elsewhere it can depend, but that’s due to Strava being irritating/changing/dropping integration features in the last couple of years and not an Apple ecosystem issue.
Or those people have maps uploaded but have chosen not to make them public?
No cloud account needed!
I connect the watch via USB cable and copy the FIT files over to the computer.
Looks like there's the same setting in a similar location on the Epix watch - https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/GUID-E5C62F3F-DCE3-4...
Granted, I'm not a serious runner, I only do it as a supplement for my muay thai training (i.e. I'm only running 5-8k at like a 4'30" or so pace). So I guess I'm interested in what runners who are running as their primary sport like about the Garmin, as I often hear people say the Garmin is so much better.
Play music and run is fine for lots of people, though, so I'm not surprised it works for you.
That's one aspect that's relevant once you're done, the other one relevant during the workout is that you can set different targets for different parts of your workout, e.g. you want to be at 100 bpm during your warmup, 160 bpm during a 4min interval, then rest 2min at 120bpm, things like that. If you don't strictly follow the program you initially planned (e.g. you want to have as much rest as you feel you need) then you'd have to interact with your watch.
Definitely easier to navigate a playlist with physical buttons -- I run with airpods and just do the double/triple touch on them for forward/back.
See garmindb: https://github.com/tamkaho/GarminDB
You can get a rolling average of your stress for example, or your sleep times.
They make avionics systems. They probably have a good culture of making well tested, reliable software.
I switched to a Garmin Venu 3. It is better than AW in many aspects, but is also lacking in some. But the Connect app is a lot better than Apple Health.
The other thing is, battery life degrades over time, which is relevant if you don't want to be buying new devices every couple of years. When I got my Garmin it probably held a charge for 6-7 days. After four years, that is probably closer to 4 days, which is still pretty good. If less than a day is the starting point, I can imagine that after 3+ years the battery life will be poor enough that you regularly end up wearing a paperweight on your wrist for some portion of the day.
All the manufacturers today are trying to sell connected services, so devices are accumulating lots of features and heft. In addition, none of the manufacturers quantify the strength of vibration (what units would that be expressed in?). The lightest bands are the lowest end/value models and have the worst vibration mechanisms.
What I want is: (1) see the current time (2) get a buzz for a notification (3) alarm clock (4) ability to wear for multiple days without charging.
I'm also wondering how it evolves. Batteries don't get better over time, I'd be worried of having to end up charging it twice a day in one year, which for a device this expensive is not great.
Similar to your battery life concern. It’s valid but we are on what…evolution 11 now? My current two year old watch has more than enough battery. Prior to that I had one for 4 years I think. Same deal no issues in batteries.
You need to charge that every week? Well this one lasts two weeks. Only two weeks, what a drag, this one lasts a month.
You need to actually charge it? A Citizen Eco Drive charges itself even with only indoor light. Or an automatic watch that self winds on regular wrist movements, never really needing a "charge" so long as you're actively wearing it.
It's all a trade off of what kind of features you want on your "watch". I'm not taking phone calls and doing NFC payments on an Eco Drive. People are going to value different things, to many charging a few minutes every day isn't an issue for what they seem to get from it.
if anything, the garmin's battery life was a downside, because i wouldn't charge it daily, and then i'd go to start a bike ride and find it was at 10% battery.
Garmin watches are great for people who prioritize active lifestyles over social contact but still like to have the ability to receive notifications on their wrist. Do note, though, that Garmin's Vivo line has become "smarter" in the current gen, but I don't see them ever tackling Apple Watches directly with Forerunner, Fenix, etc models.
Apple Watch is not smartphone agnostic (requiring iPhone for Apple Watch setup). That's Apple's choice. Apple Watch has done well targeting just iPhone users. It makes some stuff easier for devs.
But South Korea has its own walled garden - https://www.gizchina.com/2023/11/13/korean-smartphone-market....
The upside of the small battery capacity is a relatively fast charge time. If you put a watch charger in your bathroom you could put your watch on the charger when you go in for a shower and it'll be charged by the time you're finished showering, getting dressed, etc. I find it's a time that I have my watch off anyway, so it's not something that interferes with my daily use in any way. YMMV obviously, and after a few years when the battery starts holding less of a charge you may find a weirder time spacing that becomes irritating at times, but it's worked for me for years.
It's just that Apple Watch is power hungry.
They don't really do the job of a regular smart watch and aren't designed for wearing all the time, so it becomes a secondary device you need to manage and charge separately, not to mention pay for. Meanwhile, an Apple Watch can do all of it.
IME, the battery life of Garmin's isn't a game changer... if you're using GPS (which for me would be all the time I'm using it), you're still charging regularly. Might as well charge every time you take it off. Not quite daily, but in the same ball park.
The Apple Watch actually provides worse functionality for notifications than my Garmin, since it wants to act as its own separate device, instead of simply mirroring my phone's notifications.
Interacting with the Apple Watch is usually so difficult and the app support is lacking (I believe it's actually gotten worse over time) that I generally take out my phone for anything beyond pressing the dismiss button, so it's no better than the Garmin.
And for fitness Garmin is very very good. Today was below -10 C on my run and my watch was 100% usable with gloves. Garmin actually tells me when I get a GPS lock and it works ANT+ devices.
I use the GPS all the time on my Fenix, it's 6 years old and I'm still charging roughly once a week. I think a 6 year old Apple Watch would struggle to get a day, if that.
+On a non-Apple device.
I'm pretty happy with the level of "smart" integration on my Garmin watch, which boils down to "show me a preview of incoming SMS and Telegram messages and the contact name when I receive a phone call". Plus the syncing of fitness activities. I do go back-and-forth on whether I want it to buzz or not for text messages, but that roughly overlaps between when I'm wearing the watch in the first place, so that has worked out well in my particular case.
It fits well into my general philosophy of smartphone notifications, where real humans are allowed to buzz or make attention-grabbing noise (phone calls / text messages) and everything else waits silently in the notification drawer until I choose to look at the phone.
If you look at Apple watch activity tracking, though, Garmin is playing a different ballgame.
Calorie counting on apple is off by 2-5x (compared to energy output measured on an erg, and running and biking are similarly _really_ incorrect on apple, and in my experience pretty spot-on with Garmin).
Reviewing an activity on apple fitness is really, _really_ coarse. You can't pick what metric is shown on the map. You can't plot a metric over time. Even something as simple as max speed? Who knows!
Apple's attempted copycat of body battery functionality in the new iOS 18 seems like it was designed by a PM that was handed 2-3 screenshots from a Garmin, shrugged, and went from that. It's wholly useless—but on Garmin, this is a valuable feature included 8 years ago in their cheapest running watches.
You can also reply to text messages with a limited set of canned responses on Android phones only. This doesn't work on iPhones because Apple has intentionally blocked third-party smart watches from being allowed to use that API in a particularly monopolistic and consumer-hostile move.
My wife uses GPS all the time, why else you would buy premium watch like Fenix for. Apple watch needs charging / daily/bi-daily. Garmins of my wife who even sleeps with them with monitoring on - every 5-6 days, after cca 4 years of ownership already with same battery. You can definitely wear them all the time, and if you can't, same goes for other watch as well. This is what these watches are for if you still have issues understanding their market proposition, long term usage, without battery anxiety and additional management of frequent charging.
They can have eSim, but I really don't see a reason and the price to pay in terms of battery drain is too steep. I don't know anybody around who is using it, everybody still have their phone with them.
If I want to be reachable, there is phone which I can put into any pocket, if I want some quiet peace time, I can just listen to the music streamed from watch. I would never rely on tiny watch with crappy battery and super tiny cellular antenna re safety ie in wilderness or mountains where signal is non-ideal.
I wear my Epix 2 every day and it does all I want from a smartwatch - see incoming texts and calls while it tracks my health stats day and night. Yes, apple watch or Samsung ones may have more features, but I am not missing anything.
Well, they look like sport watches.
People can choose the aesthetic they want, but you're sending a message with one that's that opinionated, which I don't particularly want to.
The official straps are pricey but you can easily find cheaper aftermarket ones, e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Titanium-strap-Garmin-AMOLED-titanium...
I have a Fenix 6, I've worn it every day for the last 4.5 years. Its a brilliant smartwatch. I have multiple apps from Garmin's IQ store on it. Battery lasts between one and two weeks, thats including recording multiple activities each week, while using it to play music to my bluetooth headphones.
I'll take my multiple weeks of battery life for a single charge on the Forerunner 965. The data and analytics are fantastic as well.
It fits well into my general philosophy of smartphone notifications, where real humans are allowed to buzz or make noise (phone calls / text messages) and everything else waits silently in the notification drawer until I choose to look at the phone.
I recently renewed my Garmin watch and I did the same: disable all the phone related features.
And one of the Reddit comments quoted in the article says the same:
> Apple Watch is a Smartwatch with fitness features, Garmin is a Fitness watch (with admittedly lacking) smartwatch features.
People still buy Garmin watches instead of Apple Watch because they don't want the "smart" stuff, they want the fitness stuff first.
And yeah, the battery life is also a big factor!
There is a separate number as far as billing. But the cellular carrier pairs your cellular watch with an iPhone on the same network. So calls come in and go out as if they were coming from your iPhone’s number. Whenever someone calls your phone - they both ring.
If your phone is on and close enough to your watch so they are connected via Bluetooth (or WiFi?), all data and voice communication is relayed through your phone to save battery life.
If your watch isn’t connected to your phone, the Watch uses cellular.
Roaming support for Apple Watches was just announced in 2022 and is still not ubiquitous
As an only device for kids, it was about 80% there and over the course of a few years Apple made 0 progress, so we gave up on it as a concept. Only 1 kid still wears the watch; the other two are e-waste.
The basic tracking of cardio, hiking, snowshoeing, etc, is exactly what I want from a smartwarch (lets me gamify my physical activity, and sleep).
I does have some great ways to map hikes, find out how to get back (direct path, or retrace steps, etc). Its pretty amazing for a low level garmin.
Different people prefer different things, for me its definitely the smart watch part. I am rather sporty, and tbh don't care about phone capabilities on my wrist, when I have it in the pocket/on the desk, that 1s lost when reaching for it is fine.
Premium price, premium look, massively better battery, durability, option of solar charging etc. I am taking poster child in Garmin Fenix 8 since they have very wide range of products compared to Apple. Fenix 8 is also much prettier than Apple's ultra wrist brick but thats subjective I guess. Diving capabilities for casual divers like me are just cherry on top, saving me some 300-400 for good enough (but otherwise completely useless) diving computer, minimizing yet-another-device syndrome.
If there's a way to use Garmin's smartwatches without using their cloud I probably would consider that. But since their ransomware attack from 2020, I really can no longer trust their cloud any more, especially that the data collected from a smartwatch is on the more sensitive side. The only Garmin hardware I'm still using is their bicycle tail light+radar, which I just use with wahoo's bike computer instead of other Garmin products.
Combined with the chest monitor I could get balance, impact, stride etc stats live on my watch, which was great for helping correct a leftward lean I didn't know I was doing. So there are definitely some great features for runners. I hate carrying a phone, my watch does have GarminPay and music.
Also, I've found that the current iteration of their wrist HR sensors are quite good [compared to a chest strap] for everything except outdoor cycling. I have an Epix 2 Pro and never wear a chest strap for anything but cycling anymore.
1. LTE connectivity. Being able to take calls, get texts, send out live track notifications from my watch would be really fantastic. I take my phone out on runs not because I want to use my phone, but because that's the only way I can do all that stuff.
2. Paired with LTE connectivity, music/podcast streaming. My watch supports downloading playlists before a run which is nice but (frankly) a bit clunky. I really want to just be able to kick off yt music or spotify and instead.
But honestly, if I had to give up my other features like long battery life to get either of those two then I'm good just not having them.
I had fitbit watches before my garmin and I love the garmin ecosystem. My wife has a pixel watch and really the two features above are the only things it does that I'd want from it.
And try reading a longer notification on a round display. It just doesn’t make any sense.
1) build headquarters in (relatively) low COL city - in this case, Olathe KS, which is a suburb of Kansas City MO.
2) Have people who actually want to make a product instead of making analysts happy
3) Invest in R&D
4) Bring manufacturing in-house and tightly control processes
It's like everything the people actually doing the work at tech companies have been saying for years.
Can I have my $10mil/year pay package now?
When Garmin originally launched a scuba watch, I was kind of surprised. It's a small market, and there were a lot of established "good enough" players in the space. Everyone already had a dive computer. Who would want an expensive one from Garmin when they could buy an expensive one from Shearwater? But Garmin showed up with a good product, iterated by adding their sonar based SubWave for air integration, and eventually took a lot of marketshare by including fitness and smartwatch features the competitors lacked. Now I see tons of Garmins on dive boats. People love them.
Another place they shine is for bikes. Their radar system that integrates with a bike computer is absolutely groundbreaking. It's so fantastic to be able to know when a car is coming up behind you without having to turn your head and possibly lose balance, it's such a great safety feature.
- sells an accurate blood pressure cuff with WiFi data sync (sans phone)
- is an active R&D contributor to OpenEmbedded Linux
- includes optional health data sync to vertically integrated cloud
- provides open FIT [1] protocol for local data sync
I switch to GadgetBridge but without updating the AGPS files, no reliable GPS.
How open of them.
Go prep for workout.
Just before heading out, I'll go by the window and get the watch which has locked on to the nearby GPS satellites.
Start workout.
Any feedback from Garmin on this issue? It sounds like a bug, unless they have documented a non-technical policy dependency between GPS and cloud login.
Garmin is undoubtedly already aware that you need cloud login for their devices to download almanac and ephemeris over the internet.
It's pretty good too, you get a lot of features that were limited to airliners in the past. Like seeing terrain contours around you. Not that I fly IFR (instrument without visibility conditions) but still. I think it's very impressive.
At our place they were the same price (though the steam gauge one was a newer type). They still had to have it because some exams require it.
Where I flew was all VFR territory.
Personal electronics (unless you are Apple basically) is a pretty fickle business and fortunes can change very rapidly. Aviation? Not so much, unless you chuck a Boeing.
I've got mine set to charge to 80%, and over 23.5 hours it typically falls to somewhere in the 30-40% range. I put it on the charger for 30 minutes when I sit on my couch in the evening to watch Jeopardy! and do the NYT crossword puzzle. That's plenty of time to get it back to 80%.
I do have the always on display turned off, so the display only comes on when I turn the watch to look at it or tap or click. Always on display would take more power but my recollection from before turning it off is that it would still easily make it 23.5 hours starting from 80%. With a 20 W charger it can go from 0 to 80% in 30 minutes, so that would still be done by the time I finished Jeopardy and the crossword.
(I didn't turn off always on display to save battery. I turned it off because I didn't really find it useful. When I'm not actively checking the watch I almost hold it in a position where I don't really have a good look at the display, and moving it so I can get a good look almost always would be enough to turn it on in "raise to wake" mode).
I have a stand by my bed that I just plop my phone, watch and AirPods on and they all charge wirelessly and use MagSafe so I don’t have to worry about placement.
It’s fully charged in an hour and half from looking at the documentation.
I'm very much on the other side of that decision - I find sleep tracking to be a killer feature, but you can see how Apple got away with it.
The sleep quality and breathing measurements are based on movement - which doesn’t make sense when you have another person or pet with you in the bed that also tends to move at night.
That’s why we still have sleeping labs. However, the watch’s data can be an indicator that something is wrong and get people to at least mention it to their doc.
YOu can have a resting heart rate while sleeping in the 30s, yet your real resting heart rate in the 60s.
I don't need a watch to tell me if I was sleeping or not, I was there, I know if I was sleeping... I also don't see the point if it telling me if I got enough sleep or not. Again, I know if I didn't get enough sleep as I'm tired...
I also don't think it's sleep tracker is accurate, I've had my garmin tell me I have taken naps when I hadn't. I was just lying on the sofa watching a film and didn't get up for an hour or so. That doesn't mean I'm asleep.
One thing that surprised me has been seeing the affects of either alcohol or caffeine on the type and quality of the sleep I get.
Even if the absolute numbers aren't 100% accurate the watch definitely spots when I've had even 1 beer during the evening.
I also find heart rate variability interesting. I can't put much spin on the absolute numbers but after either heavy exercise or if I've been unwell I can see the variability rate really drop.
A lot of value is in the long term trends. One bad night doesn't mean much but if our sleep quality is trending down over weeks, it's a sign you should change something.
What makes one measurement "real" and the other one "not real", if you're mainly using it as a personal metric?
The reason that the traditional definition of resting heart rate exists is people didn't have 24/7 heart rate monitors, and doctors had to measure what they are able to measure. And they still can't measure it well, because patients often have white coat syndrome and there's not enough time during an appointment for people to relax fully.
The Apple Watch, which uses the traditional definition, has to use algorithms to guess which of its measurements counts as "resting" or not, which adds complexity. In contrast, lowest HR during sleep is a more reliable and consistent measurement.
However, for me, the results looked reasonable most nights and for those nights when I didn't sleep well for whatever reason, I mostly knew that was the case without the device results.
for me at least, the silent alarm so as to not disturb my partner is a huge part of the value in a smart watch.
The market more likely is people that see themselves as "extreme adventurers, mountaineers, extreme hikers, etc", despite mostly doing half day rides at the nearest mountain biking trail, national park hikes where they spend one night in a cabin, and a weekend snow boarding at a ski resort.
> spend one night in a cabin, and a weekend snow boarding at a ski resort
This should be enough to get people away from any watch without the features I mentioned - long battery life and button-operated.
One gripe is that the functionality with gloves is a little annoying since you can get false positive screen taps from sleeves/cuffs. A second is that the main button is pressed when doing a pushup or in some situations while climbing, which triggers the emergency alarm mode by default (but is configurable to turn off).
Most adventures are not many days long without sleeping (for me) and this watch works pretty well.
You can use Siri to start a workout
I leave it in airplane mode (this leaves bluetooth on, so it doesn’t impact functionality when my phone is nearby) and disabled the always on screen.
I agree about the questionable value proposition though. A $35 Amazfit band is surprisingly competitive with it, and has much better battery life.
Eh, what? When watches were just watches, most everyone wore there watch while sleeping.
On that note, my brother and I were talking about these smart watches the other day and I expressed how having a gshock is nice because with my use I seem to get about 7 years of battery life, so my watch is always on. Whereas people with smart watches has (as he put it) significant time blind-spots. But he made a comment at one point and basically said something like "It's not a watch. It is a fitness device that has a clock in it". I think that is a good point. As a watch, all these actually perform rather poorly. But as fitness/GPS/communication devices they perform well.
Garmin's competition is having kids. Moms and dads will buy Apple Watches because it is more compatible with the having kids lifestyle. In contrast you don't need a dive computer or a bicycle thing when you have no time for hobbies. So an Apple Watch with a diving app meets the demand for aspirational hobbies, which of course, aspirations have a much larger audience than going out and doing something.
That said, people having fewer kids is ultimately what is helping them the most. Every hobby got more expensive, there is more demand. If you believe that more dogs and cats, less home buying, more video game playing and TV watching, etc. is also related to the trend of fewer kids - if you read what experts say about this, and if you can believe that LOTS of stuff people spend money LOTS of money on is DIRECTLY CAUSED by the decision to have or not have kids - then expand your mind and look for it everywhere.
Everyone is very active outdoors here and as a family. The gyms are family gyms and have daycare services while you work out. Fitness is VERY popular here as are fitness trackers and Apple is a distant third to Garmin & Fitbit.
In terms of data, well, the number of kids per family is trending down, marriage is trending down, relationships are trending down... I don't need to measure anything, everyone's audience is becoming the No Kids audience.
Certain developed countries, Apple iPhone market share is 55%-65% (Norway, USA, Canada, Japan), UK is at 50% and starts dropping down in other Western European countries. South Korea is dominated by Samsung.
Even then, Apple's ~55% of the USA market isn't across all age groups - iPhone is a monopoly for teens, 87%, - see https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/10/iphone-teen-survey-2023....
- hyphen-minus
− minus sign (should have equal width to +)
– en dash
My understanding is the meat and potatoes at Garmin is Aircraft and marine flight instrumentation. Both require an unbelievable amount of [actual] engineering and proof testing, and subsequent certification.
The Automotive GPS was a lucrative market for a brief time, but a pretty big misunderstanding of what the company does at its core.
Fitness trackers was always a market opportunity, and they happen to be really good at it (I've yet to ever run out of battery life on my Garmin Epix Gen2, even after a 5 day expedition using all features and no charging, and using the built-in flashlight at night). They're also pretty ubiquitous in the Bike Computer space.
they may be highly profitable in aviation and marine and they may develop there first. is that what you mean by core?
because revenue-wise the core was automotive in the beginning and now is outdoors and fitness.
I'm still considering getting a next gen Apple Watch Ultra if the specs are good. Having data on the watch plus being able to use certain apps are advantages
Apple doesn't make this sports ecosystem
I'd expect that you can also start one with Siri but have never actually tried, mainly because the idea of using Siri to start/stop workouts never occurred to me until reading this thread, which I happened to be doing this morning while doing a workout on my treadmill.
I worry that Garmin isn't well placed to compete with the new generation smart watches though. Google and Apple can make watches with connected voice assistants and phone calls. Garmin uses their own OS on hardware an order of magnitude less powerful. That's their strength and weakness, and it will be interesting to see what the market chooses. My next watch will also be a Garmin, I don't need or want a wrist computer, but I can see why others would want that.
In the UK, TomTom was much bigger than Garmin for in-car GPS:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=g...
It guess they didn't have the same market penetration / dominance in the US market.
And the most important -- no one there ever talks about alternatives. Except for non-certified experimental tools -- Garmin is pretty much the only game in town.
So I believe they operate as aviation/maritime company first, while all the consumer devices like watches/outdoor trackers are like a side-business for them. Yes, that side business happens to bring in more money than the main business, but they wisely don't rely on it.
I don't believe the Garmin tracks apnea signals or heart issues at all unfortunately
I don't think Garmin has a device that is able to track or identify sleep anea events but would not be surprised to see that functionality appear in the near future on some product.
I have an Instinct 2 Solar and it has been great for me. I told other relatives about it and they have picked their own models to suit their lifestyles.
I think that is Garmin's strength, the wide variety of fitness devices suited for almost any activity or personality.
It sucked at first but the things I do enjoy now, I enjoy them just as much.
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/garmin-technology/health-scienc...
When your workout syncs from your watch to the Garmin app, Garmin ships it to a whole bunch of other places - a whole data pipeline kicks off across the Internet at no cost to you.
If only more of the software world would settle into this type of equilibrium, instead of the competitive data hoarding we see from so many other companies, it’d be a far better world for consumers and competition.
Garmin’s business model doesn’t depend on hoarding data. Hope it stays that way!
10 years ago, they had a hand full of different models with clearly distinguished features. And there was one does-it-all model.
Now, they’re releasing 20 different watches a year which are all clearly based on the same hardware - just with different features enabled via software. There’s no top-of-the-line model anymore that has ALL the features.
And while I was able to turn my Fenix 5 Plus into a D2 Delta via a simple firmware patch, they’re now using encrypted firmwares in all newer models. I.e. they’ve wasted lots of development hours on implementing encryption instead of fixing some of the various bugs reported in their forums or implementing some of the feature requests.
And don’t get me started on their nav units. They’re using maps from HERE. And after fixing mapping errors yourself in HERE’s MapCreator, it takes AT LEAST a year until they finally show up on a device. If you’re lucky.
Also, my motorbike unit’s manual explained a feature where it would warn you of upcoming bad weather. However, this feature never materialised and newer manuals don’t mention it anymore.
Garmin is at a bit of risk from these sort of companies cause it costed me 7K INR (its newer variants cost a bit more), there is another brand called Coros which has the same value proposition as Garmin as well, so yeah the good times might not last always.
But they have also other interesting set of products like a GPS device for cycles which I don't think anyone else offers yet which gives a lot of advanced metrics like power, cadence apart from speed, time etc but those too cost a bomb and apparently people are being arrested for using it in my country.
If you’re not old like me, know that Google Maps launched in 2005 a couple years before the iPhone. It launched on the web and was lauded for its pioneering degree of interactivity (aided by then-new technology “AJAX”).
Presumably he means Google Maps app for the iPhone/Android.
Personally I have owned a Fitbit Ionic, and now an Apple Watch. I'm not sure if I'll ever take the plunge towards a Garmin watch, I mainly enjoy the benefits of the Apple Watch integrating into my iPhone nicely (notifications and GPS nudging come to mind).
For what its worth they managed to lose 0.4 of their Play store rating down from 4.5 in short order, and thats based on 1M+ reviews, so not an insignificant number
So lack of customization, and lots of deep-navigation. Garmin's initial action was silence, eventually they said to get over it its not going back. Apparently it got poor feedback in Beta too, so this was just a change they decided chug through with despite a very large outcry on their forums.
The reason is that they want me to regularly connect the watch to their app/software (which requires an account) to update AGPS files. And there's no workaround.
I'd just like to be able to use the watch I bought, without having it connect it to Garmin servers every now and then. Why isn't it possible?
Now I'm really pleasantly surprised at how good the descent mk3 is which I wear all day and there's also inreach etc. Garmin products are really safe buys when it comes to fitness devices. Other smart watches suffer mostly from the software side whereas Garmin connect syncs well and has good UX.
I have no deeper analysis than that, other than that I remember how proud they were to be able to launch 2 phones per month.
I am a Garmin user myself, but i have a basic $150 ForeRunner 45. I love it and use it every day, because it has all the features and no touch screen.
For women you may want to look at the forerunner 265S which is identical to the forerunner 265 but is slightly smaller. The HRM-fit I believe gives the same data as the HRM Pro Plus but is designed to fit under a sports bra
I had the original Pebble and Pebble 2. Loved them. Then one day Pebble was just shut down because of an acquisition by Fibit[1]. There was a group of people that started Rebble[2] to restore web services and support the watch but I was not interested so I switched over to Fitbit.
I had the Fitbit Versa 2 and Versa 3 watches and for a while they were great. Then Google bought Fitbit[3]. The impending "Killed by Google" was always in the back of mind, especially since they already sold smart watches. But I have been on Pixel phones for a while now and I thought maybe Google buying them would lead to good things. At first not much changed, but eventually I started having issues with the watch (more info about that below) and I got fed up with it and now I have a Garmin Watch.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)#Closing_of_Pebb...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)#Rebble
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitbit#Google's_acquisition
The issues I was having with my Versa 3:
Daily I would notice I had missed a sms notification and realize that my watch was disconnected from my phone. I had to go in and manually reconnect it. I also had issues using the voice command feature. I used to be able to use my Google Assistant through the watch, but at some point it just said "check bluetooth connection", even after confirming that connection. So sometime last year I decided to see if a factory reset would work. I did that and did the whole setup process again which included upgrading to the latest firmware. This did not fix the issue and it came with the added bonus of completely disabling my sleep tracking. I think I was grandfathered in because sleep tracking became a premium service that I was getting for free but doing the reset lost that. So now I was out of sleep tracking, voice commands to any assistant, and a stable connection.
I am one of the few people left that still use Garmin's car GPS. I currently use the latest model, the Drive Smart 66. It is my daily driver (lol?).
I recently went on a cross country road trip and this thing worked perfectly even when I was in the middle of the desert or driving through a canyon. It was nice to not rely on cell phone service for navigation on this trip.
Although the question often comes up: why not just use your phone? There are pros and cons for sure.
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Pros:
- You don't need a cellular connection for map data. -- Counter Point: You can download map data on google maps. True, but it is something extra that you need to remember to do.
- You don't need to waste your cellular data -- Counter Point: Don't most people have unlimited plans these days?
- A corporation isn't tracking your every move -- Counter Point: Most people don't seem to care about this.
- Modern Garmin GPSs can get traffic data -- Counter Point: It requires a cellphone and it is not going to be as good as google maps
- Modern GPS screens look just as good as a phone and you can get one that is as large as a tablet -- Counter Point: you could probably use a tablet and google maps
- Garmin makes GPS units for specific vehicles like motorcycles and RVs and they take their vehicles quirks into account when routing trips. Google maps is one size fits all
- A Garmin GPS unit from 20 years ago will still work today as long as you can update the maps.
- Because of the previous point, it is very nice to keep one of these in the trunk of your car as a back up
- Garmin GPSes can handle sitting in the hot sun without overheating, which some cell phones are prone to do.
- I really like having the GPS on my dashboard so I don't have to look down and to the right to look at my car's infotainment screen -- Counter Point: You can mount a phone on your dashboard or windshield. They even sell stand alone monitors for your car where you can view apple car play as it was a stand alone gps.
Neutral
- The routing can make weird mistakes, but this is true for all GPSes including apple maps and google maps
Cons
- And this is the biggest: it is nowhere near as good at finding businesses as google maps. To me that is google map's killer feature
In addition to several of the pros you listed, I'd add a few more:
- Stupid-simple interface. I was a Google Maps user for a while, and I was not a fan of various popups (from "Welcome to <state name>" to "Is this speed trap still here?"). I'm piloting a several-thousand-pound hunk of metal at highway speeds, do NOT interrupt me!
- Unchanging interface. I'd get used to the way Google Maps behaved, and then an update would change something and break muscle memory. Whereas my 2015 Garmin isn't getting updated with unnecessary animations and pointless button re-arranging. When updating maps, the firmware update is a separate download. Since it's not Internet-connected, I don't care if I'm running "outdated" software. As long as it still gives directions, that's all I want.
- It's not my phone. I don't want my text messages coming up across the top of the screen while I'm trying to read the next turn on my route. I don't want anything on the screen that's not directly related to navigation.
It's a great example of KISS in a hardware product. It does GPS navigation. It is literally incapable of distracting you with anything else. I consider that a killer feature.
I also never considered the fact that the UI won't change randomly to be a feature lol.
In the latest model you can hook it up to the internet so when you get home it auto updates itself. You can also hook it up to your phone so text messages and Slack notifications pop up on the side of the screen. I would imagine these are features you would not want to use.
They make versions that get the traffic data over FM radio, you don't need a phone with those. For example https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/1240929.
Kodak in particular killed its novel R&D to protect its cash cow, instead of investing in R&D. So pretty much the opposite of Garmin.
Are the watches different?
Even the navigation isn't great. Most of the time when I get to a roundabout it wants me to exit at the first exit, then immediately perform a u-turn, rejoin the roundabout, and take the actual exit. Not even sure what's going wrong here, the same routes on a Wahoo unit work fine.
It would put me off buying another Garmin product to be honest.
Then the Garmin popped a big modal dialogue over the top of the map to tell me I was on the wrong street. Worse still a few spots of rain meant the screen locked and I couldn't dismiss the modal.
I came to the same conclusion, that the UI wasn't designed by some one that rode a bike.
I have to say they've got better over time though. I've had a Garmin 530 for a few years and an Epix 2 watch that I like much better. I love that the Epix can be operated with just the buttons.
UI takes a lot of time to get used to and even then there are many things I hate
As great as the hardware is the app is frankly atrocious and doesn’t inspire confidence with a company that is storing a lot of very sensitive personal information.
Fitbit 5-7 days
Apple 1 day
Does hacker news not support Tildes or what?
I first started tracking my runs with apple health, basically carrying my phone in my pocket to measure distance. Back then, I had no weekly mileage targets, or pace goals. Just a curiosity about how far I could run. Eventually, I switched to Strava. I felt a bit of friction around starting and stopping runs on the app, but I loved watching my paces gradually improve month by month.
Eventually I signed up for my first marathon, taking my iPhone in my pocket and first gen airpods that ran out of battery halfway through, but I finished in 3:48. I stuck with the iPhone for a while, but one day I zoomed into the strava map and realized the iPhone’s GPS was unreliable—it added zigzags to my routes, inflating my mileage and making me seem faster than I really was (massive ego bruise). So I went to research accurate GPS watches, and I remember seeing people test them by running straight lines to check for accuracy on a map. The forerunner was the most satisfying straight on the map, and so I bought that in May 2020.
So I’ve had a garmin since May 2020 and still love it. The simple start/stop mechanism has become a ritual for me. I also appreciate the heart rate screen, which shows my zone using colored ranges—it’s what I used to pace myself during races. For example, I’d aim to stay under 160 bpm during half marathons and marathons. With the Forerunner, I brought my time down to 3:11 for the marathon and 1:24 for the half marathon. That’s when I hit an inflection point: I couldn’t improve further without serious training plans.
I tried using Garmin Coach but made the mistake of choosing plans slightly below my fitness level. As a result, I didn’t run enough hard workouts and plateaued. After that, I lost motivation and took a break from running and lost fitness-- my old 130BPM pace became my new 160BPM pace. When I returned, I spent a year trying to regain it. I watched countless YouTube videos and read Reddit threads claiming, "every amateur runs too fast and too few miles." So I focused on high mileage without prioritizing aerobic envelope workouts. My fitness stagnated—my half marathon slowed to 1:27, and my 5K and 10K times didn’t improve. I also psyched myself by overshooting mileage targets, leaving me either sick or over-fatigued on race days.
Eventually, I gave myself permission to run hard again, and my fitness returned. I worked my way back to a 3:02 marathon last year. Now my favorite workflow involves using the VDOT app as my personal coach. I set a weekly mileage target, specify which days I can handle hard workouts, and it generates a detailed plan for me. For example: warm up for 2 miles, run 400m at a target pace of 5:40 with 1-minute rests, and cool down for 2 miles. The garmin integrates as what I call my "buzz coach" through each stage of the workout. Too fast? Buzz. Too slow? Buzz. Next lap? Buzz. The alerts really help with making real-time adjustments. Overall I find this setup eliminates the decision fatigue of training. I used to obsess over pacing, distance goals, and analyzing every bit of my data. Now it feels like I'm just getting outside, running a lot, and having fun with it—and ironically, I've just started improving again.
Some optical chronos make you shoot through a very narrow window [0] which restricts you to a tiny shooting position and don't work in many natural lighting conditions. Some attach directly to the gun or barrel to allow any shooting position but are very sensitive to offset and distance and can't be fitted to a majority of pistols and rifles to work up load data [1]. Some higher end models get around all of these issues by using radar [2] but the implementation is tricky. The unit is about the size of a laptop, has to have the flat side pointed perfectly downrange, and collects data in a window triggered by a recoil or audio sensor. Practically this makes it unusable at a public range with other shooters in adjacent lanes because you have a lot of gunshots and other projectiles and spall wizzing around at all times creating a mass of false or irrelevant data. The radar units sometimes have Bluetooth connectivity for an app that records data strings and allows you to change sensitivity settings on the radar. The app is terrible and the physical UI on the unit is atrocious as well, and most range sessions devolve into tweaking multiple sensitivity params endlessly in a futile effort to get only your own shots to register, inevitably bumping and misaligning the radar in the process.
Which brings me back to Garmin, who somehow managed to release a tiny unit [3] that is the size of a GoPro, has only one settings option (fast or slow projectiles), and simply WORKS. It has a simple and clean UI but the biggest thing is how it somehow picks up all of your shots without the need for an external audio or recoil trigger to start collecting data, and never picks up data from adjacent shooters. I truly don't understand how they managed this because it isn't sensitive to alignment like other units were. As long as it is on your bench or vaguely pointed downrange from near your position it filters out all of the other shots.
This wasn't an incremental product improvement either, they somehow launched their first product with superior UI, better form factor, better battery life, superior app integration, impeccable data quality, and better commercial availability than all of the previous solutions. When I show it to other experienced reloaders at the range they literally cannot believe how well it works. The only thing it doesn't compete on is price, which is fine because the reloading/shooting market that needs this unit is fairly well heeled and it still costs less than the combined used prices of all the various chronographs this replaces. Their product team hit this one so far out of the park.
0 - https://www.caldwellshooting.com/range-gear/chronographs-and...
1 - https://magnetospeed.com/v3-ballistic-chronograph
They're also the Cadillac of dog tracking and training collars.
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/outdoor-recreation/sporting-d...
The military (sort of) invented the Internet too, so no tech company would exist without the military.
Computers, and networks, were largely funded by DoD for artillery calculations, and then the Manhattan project.
Companies like HP were very involved in the high tech arms industry.
I noped right out. Reeked of surveillance capitalism. Shame because I did like the hardware. Is there a dumb watch that's got a good enough screen for hiking maps and the ability to SOS without sending Walmart and the NSA my realtime heart rate?
Did you change this setting on the watch?
But in typical Garmin fashion, there may be a hard to find setting to enable this. My watch asks if I want to connect to a computer when I plug in the cable.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/garma...