solq
Suspended
Yes, Epix 2.
Garmin IQ seems like an after-thought and I personally have no use for it, we agree on that. But I’m not bothered by it, I don’t need it and I don’t use it.
No clue what you mean by “not all I needed” since I don’t know what you need that a high-end Garmin watch doesn’t provide. I mean, if you need a smartwatch to send text messages or something like that, sure, it won’t do it. But I’ll do it faster on the phone than on the Apple Watch, so why do it on the Apple Watch?
I also don’t know what you mean by being terribly unhappy with the “back-porting of features”. Actually I’d say Garmin is one of the better vendors in this regard. They support their stuff for years and back-port features, and have been fairly resistant to the idea that you’d be expected to upgrade your hardware every year, which is very much the Apple Way. I just got a Macbook Pro because my previous Macbook Pro, which otherwise works perfectly and is just as fast in ordinary use as this new M2 Max, can’t get any new OS versions from Apple for absolutely no good reason except to make them more money. Talk about a company that trumpets its holier-than-thou environmentalism from every angle!
Personally I find every single scenario where people talk about unique Apple Watch functionality rather frivolous, like they use it because it’s there, not because it’s the best way to do something. As if going cycling or running without your phone is some crucial requirement, but nobody explains why that’s the case. I carry a water bottle, a bicycle pump, and a multi-tool thing when I go cycling, why wouldn’t I take my 200g phone? Seems all fake to me, to throw away something like $10 a month for Apple Watch cellular just to pretend you have a freedom that‘s not really worth much to begin with.
What a smartwatch is good at is track your body activity, which is basically non-interactive, and glancing at it, which we’ve done since the watch was invented. More interaction, like scrolling/typing on it I think is pretty much forced, the devices are too small. Voice control is too much of a hit and miss outside of basic stuff to be really useful. Like, it’s good when you get it right, but it’s annoying to fix when you get it wrong. I barely use it on the phone and avoid it anywhere else (TV/car/etc).
From this point of view, I think the whole concept of the Apple Watch is a deeply mistaken one. They made a wearable computer with awful battery life optimized for speed, graphics and text view, given the shape, which is not what a smartwatch should be at all. In my opinion!
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