Switching from Apple Watch to a Garmin Fenix, two weeks of use

I'm an amateur / casual triathlete, having done 5 short distance triathlons with my trusty Apple Watch 8. While I'm a back of the pack triathlete, I'm definitely an Apple Watch power user. I use a combination of the excellent WorkOutDoors and Watchletics apps to train, and the native Workout app for events.

However, despite every hack out there, my Apple Watch would be at 25% battery after a 4 hour event, and so I jumped on a second hand Garmin Fenix 6 Sapphire when it became available in my local tri club.

I thought I'll list out my experience with the switch, and some of the features I haven't really seen covered in most comparison videos.

Battery Life and Smart Features Let's get the obvious ones out of the way. Garmin's battery life blows the pants off the Apple Watch. But the Apple Watch is a much smarter device, and does a lot more stuff. My first day, I got into bed quite groggy, and stared at the Garmin wondering how I was supposed to switch off the lights (apple home). I felt like a caveman as I picked myself up and walked all the way over to a physical light switch.

Buttons My first thing when putting on the Garmin was to jump with joy at pressing physical buttons. They still work when you are sweaty or underwater. This seems to be the Apple Watch's really weakness.

GPS and Calculated Pace On my first run, I was very confused as to why Garmin wasn't showing my pace, and the pace seemed to update in an incredibly choppy way. It turns out that Garmin uses the GPS alone to calculate your running pace, while Apple uses a combination of GPS and other data such as motion from the accelerometer. This means that you have to wait for a GPS lock when starting a Garmin workout. Also, it's always cloudy in July in Bangalore, and today I was running under some trees. Despite going faster, my pace on the device kept dropping. Eventually the interval ended, and I started the walking / rest interval. Suddenly the watch re-obtained the GPS lock, and showed my finishing a walk at incredibly fast speeds. WorkOutDoors on the Apple Watch actually lets you choose which mode you want for pace and distance, but I always have it on Apple's default, as it always shows me the mostly-correct current pace.

Swim Garmin does the swim workouts really well, and it comes down to those buttons. When you press the lap button during a swim, it starts a rest interval. The screen inverts colors, and it shows you the pace you swam the last interval, and you press the lap button again when you are ready to swim. These small touches really go a long way for usability.

General UI Consistency The flip side of this is that every workout works differently, and it takes some getting used to. The lap button starts a new interval on a run, but a rest interval on the swim. And the pause button pauses most workouts, but in the strength training workout it opens some menu that shows settings or something. It definitely needs a bit of getting used to. On the Apple Watch, all of the workouts in the same app would generally work the same, and you'd use a different app if you wanted a totally different behaviour.

Apps And the availability of different apps is a major positive for the Apple Watch. In the strength training world, I use Hevy, a great free app for logging workouts. But there are at least a dozen apps I could use to get things to work the way I want. In Hevy for example, I can set up the workout on my phone, and then I don't need to do anything on the watch other than say "yep, this one is done".

TrainingPeaks Integration Since Garmin only has it's native workout app, it's much better integrated with TrainingPeaks to do two way sync. The default Workout app on the Apple Watch also syncs well, but the integration with third party apps is a bit hit or miss. WorkOutDoors doesn't have any TrainingPeaks integration, and so I have to manually sync workouts using HealthFit. Watchletic has much better integration.

Maps This is one area I was very disappointed with the Garmin. I expected the maps to work similar to how I use WorkOutDoors. Start a workout, and press a few buttons, and it shows me where I am, the roads nearby, which direction I'm walking, and a broad direction to get back to the start if I need it. Imagine my shock when the 'map' on the garmin was just a white background with a loop. I assumed it just needed some time to sync or something, but a week later there still was no data. Eventually I learned that to install maps, you need to go to a computer, and download the maps and sync them region by region manually. Theoretically the garmin maps are supposed to be much more powerful, and can help routing offline, and fantastic for areas where there is no network. But I just wanted to download an easy 10k around my hotel when I'm travelling, and get started with no effort. Even my super cheap magene bike computer lets me pick a destination on the phone, and just syncs the required bits of the map over. Garmin could definitely make this much better.

Auto Start and Stop Apple Watch will ask you if you are taking a walk / run if it can detect it, but more crucially, it will ask you if you have stopped working out if it detects you are in a car or not moving around anymore. I'm really surprised this feature doesn't exist on the Garmin. I had done a small walk in the park, then drove to office, and only noticed the garmin was running some 4 hours later. A small nudge from the watch would really go a long way here.

Workout Alerts This might be a bit niche, but one nice feature that both WorkOutDoors and Watchletics has is that they can pipe the workout alerts via the phone's audio. This means that if I'm connected to the phone and listening to something, the existing audio is 'ducked' while the alert is spoken. The Garmin does have some version of this, but it's not the neat '5..4..3..2..1' you get from the Apple Watch apps to tell you an interval is ending. On the other hand, the Garmin buzzer is nice and loud, so unless I have the music loud, this is good.

Resume Later Garmin lets you suspend a workout for later. This is a really cool feature, and great for when I'm walking somewhere, doing something for a few hours, then walking again, etc....

Vitals / Health Metrics I'm sure one of these is better than the other. But I'm not really smart enough, and if Athlytic (Watch app) tells me I'm ready to crush a PR and Garmin tells me to just go back to bed, I'll probably listen to the one I already wanted to.

Final Thoughts I had expected to switch over entirely to the Garmin, but ended up settling into a rhythm of using the Garmin for swims and long cycles. The Apple Watch gets used as an everyday watch, and for land based training such as runs and cycles. I sleep with the Apple Watch on as well, just because the alarm syncs with my phone. Both are good watches, but the Apple Watch just felt like the better daily driver.

TL;DR Both Garmin and Apple have a lot to learn from each other, but I think it's hard for me to recommend switching away from the Apple Watch for most casual athletes who do less than 4-5 hours of workout at a time.