From my perspective -- someone who wants the things a smart watch does -- I can't figure out what a Garmin is for.
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.
My perspective is the exact opposite - I can't tell what "smart watch" features the Apple Watch is supposed to provide me over my "fitness" Garmin as a trade off for terrible battery life.
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.
A Garmin watch is absolutely designed for wearing all the time, even when sleeping. You might prefer not to for reasons of appearance or because there are features of some other smart watch that you like, but Garmin is fine for what I use it for and does notifications etc. The battery life was a game changer for me (as an Apple Watch switcher) since it's now something I just don't worry about whereas with Apple Watch it was a daily thing and it let me down on several runs too.
What things do you want from a smartwatch? For the basics, notifications+, music controls, fitness tracking, Garmin handles well. It does not have an extensive ecosystem of apps but what apps do you need?
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.
Echoing a comment I left in a different thread: from my perspective as a Garmin watch owner, I can't find any reason why I'd want to switch to an Apple watch. (Admittedly my phone is an Android, so there's some inherent bias there. But the general point stands that I can't think of anything I'd want in a smart watch that's not a feature of my current Garmin.)
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 just talk about notifications, the apple watch is better, in that you can reply without pulling out your phone, or even take the voice call, which you can't (at least afaik) on a Garmin.
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.
Some Garmin devices have a speaker and microphone so you can take a voice call using it as a Bluetooth device linked to your phone.
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.
Oh man so many... inaccuracies to be polite in 1 post.
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.
can you elaborate on " aren't designed for wearing all the time"?
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.
The newer Fenixes are a lot more elegant looking. If you paired it with one of those steel-link straps I don't see why it wouldn't look great with a suit.
Ummm... and Apple Watches are the epitome of high fashion? I don't think this is a strong argument when directly comparing these two things. Fwiw, I have met quite a few watch enthusiasts who wear a mechanical watch on one wrist and an Apple Watch on the other. This seems natural, honestly, since the primary function of an Apple Watch is definitely not to tell time.
Sorry, hard disagree with everything you've said here.
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.
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.