Sorry, Garmin: How the Apple Watch finally won me over

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• Duolingo will now teach you music
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Back in 2015, when the Apple Watch was new, I bought one—and then found myself not using it much. At the time, it felt like a pretty rough draft of what Apple was trying to accomplish. For one thing, the company had managed to create a timepiece that wasn’t very good at, um, telling you the time: Its screen stayed off until you raised your arm, and even doing that didn’t reliably turn it on.

After my original Apple Watch ended up at the back of my dresser drawer, I paid only fitful attention to the evolution of its successors, usually around the time they were announced. But for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been wearing the latest model, the Apple Watch Series 9. Living with nearly a decade’s worth of improvements all at once makes me feel like Rip Van Winkle waking up in a distant future in which everything is amazing. In fact, I liked the watch Apple provided for review so much that I’ve already bought one of my own. (Both are the $429 version with a 45 mm aluminum case.)

Now, since the early days of the pandemic, I have been wearing smartwatches—various models from Garmin, most recently the Instinct 2 Solar. With its rudimentary monochrome screen, push-button interface, and Casio G-Shock-like aesthetics, the Instinct is about as far from an Apple Watch as you can get while remaining in the same product category. I’ve used it for fitness tracking, mobile payments, and keeping tabs on app notifications while I’m out and about.

One of the reasons it’s been fun to wear the Instinct is because I don’t see it on zillions of other wrists. (In the Bay Area, at least, the Apple Watch is ubiquitous.) It runs for a couple of weeks on a charge before I need to plug it in, even though it turned out that I don’t spend enough time in the sun for its tiny built-in solar panel to meaningfully top off the battery. And on some level, its sheer basicness is refreshing: It may be the least-distracting gadget I own.

But thanks to Apple’s yearly updates, a 2023 Apple Watch is so much better than the 2015 original I never quite bonded with. It’s dramatically faster, with a bigger, brighter screen and more sensors. The display stays on in an energy-saving dimmed mode. There are now more case styles and colors, customizable face options, and band types, all of which help you put together an Apple Watch that doesn’t feel like everybody else’s Apple Watch. I even figured out how to create some wacky watch faces of my own.

Then there’s the stuff that’s brand-new in the Apple Watch Series 9—most notably the ability to perform a double-tap gesture with the hand you wear the watch on. That lets you perform actions such as answering a call without needing to touch the watch with your other hand. The feature is still in beta: It did a good job of detecting my tapping, but isn’t enabled for some of the actions I’d find most useful, such as closing notifications while I’m biking. But the Series 9 offers other incremental benefits, including a brighter screen and a new version of Siri that can handle many tasks without connecting to your iPhone or the internet.

I consciously decided to purchase a Garmin watch with the most old-school interface imaginable, so I can’t criticize my Instinct 2 Solar for not living up to Apple’s slick, colorful touchscreen experience. Still, the Apple Watch comes far closer to realizing the full potential of its particular design goals than Garmin generally does with its own smartwatches. (Let’s not even talk about the awfulness of the Garmin Connect smartphone app.) Common maneuvers that are a bit of a hassle on a Garmin watch, such as starting, stopping, and pausing workouts, are way easier on the Apple Watch. And while Garmin reserves maps for some of its priciest watches, Apple made an exemplary version of Apple Maps standard equipment on every model it sells.

In some ways, the most striking contrast between the two watches is Apple’s radically greater success in building a true platform. I can use the Apple Watch to tap myself into the San Francisco subway system and make payments using any of my credit cards. I’m luxuriating in excellent third-party apps such as Overcast, Fantastical, and Strava. My smart garage door offers an Apple Watch app that lets me open and close the door with two taps. I expect to keep discovering useful things I didn’t know my new watch could do.

I do have one credit card that works with Garmin Pay—thank you, Bank of America—and I’d been opening the garage door with my old watch using a clunky $15 third-party app that didn’t always work. But mostly, mass transit systems, financial institutions, and third-party app developers just don’t care enough about Garmin users to cater to them. When they’re going to support only one smartwatch platform, we all know which one it will be.

Giving up my Garmin does involve a few sacrifices. Weirdly, the Apple Watch offers no built-in way to display a step count on a watch face. You need a third-party app such as StepsApp, and even those don’t update the number in anything like real time. (Apple expects you to complete “rings” for “move,” “exercise,” and “stand,” a less concrete set of fitness goals I still regard with instinctive skepticism.) This watch also needs a convenient way to pin your most-used apps for speedy access—something it once offered but is gone in the new WatchOS 10—or at least to tuck lesser-used ones out of the way.

And then there’s the matter of battery life. I couldn’t run down my Instinct’s battery in a day—or maybe even a week—if I tried. But the Apple Watch needs to be recharged at some point in every 24-hour period, which complicated my intention to use it as a sleep tracker. When I spent much of one Sunday riding my e-bike and using the Apple Watch for mapping, fitness tracking, and podcasts, its battery hit zero by late evening. (Even the Apple Watch Ultra 2’s claim of 36 hours between charges is skimpy by Garmin standards.)

Still, it’s no mystery why the Apple Watch needs to be charged so often: It’s got a far better screen than the Garmin, enough computing muscle to run real apps, and additional features such as Siri, which I’ve found myself using a lot more than I expected. It does so much that I can leave my phone in my pocket most of the time, which is one reason to wear a smartwatch in the first place. At the moment, babysitting its battery feels like a fair trade-off, and I’ve acclimated myself to occasionally tossing the watch on a charger in the morning or evening (see “Gadget of the Week” below).

In the end, I’m glad that my old Garmin Instinct and new Apple Watch pursue such different priorities. The world is better off with both of them. And the next time I get jaded about the fact that this year’s gadgets aren’t dramatically better than last year’s, I’ll remind myself how much the Apple Watch improved while I wasn’t looking.

Gadget of the Week: HiRise 3 Deluxe

One other difference between my old and new watches: While they both use proprietary charging systems, only Apple’s magnetic puck is widely supported by third-party companies that build it into useful accessories. I’ve been trying one of them, Twelve South’s new HiRise 3 Deluxe. It’s a top-of-the-line charging stand for Apple enthusiasts that can accommodate an Apple Watch and an iPhone, as well as AirPods or AirPods Pro if they have a magnetic charging case. (Alternatively, you can charge a second phone or any other Qi-enabled device instead of the AirPods.)

You can pay a lot less than the HiRise’s $150 price to charge all that stuff. But this compact stand is beautifully decked out in “vegan leather” and feels built to last. Its adjustable iPhone holder lets you rotate and angle the phone as you like, which matters in part because iOS 17’s new StandBy feature turns an iPhone into a tiny smart display that tells time and supports widgets for weather, photos, and the like—pretty handy if it’s in view on a desk or nightstand.

Despite having owned wireless charging-enabled iPhones and AirPods for a few years now, I’ve been slow to ditch my trusty cables. The HiRise 3 Deluxe is so elegant that cutting the cord finally feels irresistible.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90960554/apple-watch-series-9-garmin-instinct?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss