If you need to be able to go without charging you watch for days, you are right, the Apple Watch (now and for the next few years - or maybe ever) is not the product for you. No question about that. I charge my watch before I go to sleep and if I have a heavy workout morning, while I am in the shower.
I have a few questions for those Garmin users talking about the over a month long battery life:
- how often do you charge your watch, and how do you have a habit to make sure you do it?
- How long does it take to charge from empty to full?
- How long do you get with live track running on LTE using a Forerunner 945 LTE?
Not likely in real world use, I expect it will still be a day (simply because it is unlikely that most people will turn enough other things off to make that work). While many of the Garmin folks here cannot understand why anyone would ever want things like LTE for calls,
etc., many Watch users just expect it to be there and want the larger battery to make it work better.
The two most apps that most people talk about for adding missing functionality are WorkOutDoors and HealthFit. I think the are both $4.99 with out a subscription. One's data for for most of the workout apps I have used gets stored in Apple Health, meaning that I will never have to pay to get access to it, nor can anyone not in possession of my iPhone have access to it (unless I chose to use HealthFit or similar and uploaded it to some other service).
Given that both of those apps have been around for a long time, I think their current amortized cost for me for both of them is $2 a year. I will note that both support Family Sharing and if one includes my BF and the others on my account that have watches it drops the cost down to under $0.40 per person per year.
Do you have any examples of applications that you actually used (or considered) that duplicated functionality of the built in Garmin Apps that as a group would cost over $500 a year (even $250 a year), or is this just "it could be"?
What percentage of Garmin customers do you think use 75% of the stats that Garmin's watches collect? What about 50%?
By "occasional athletes" do you really mean "anyone who does not mind a routine that includes charging one's watch every day, and does not do extreme sports"? I jog/run/walk several miles every day. I do a HIIT workout every day (using another one time purchase app called Streaks Work Out) and done over 1,400 consecutive days. I have been doing a Daily Yoga practice every day over over 1,400 days. I also do other sports activities, but not as regularly. I have happily been using my Apple Watch as my only tracker for many years.
Are there things I wish Apple would add? Of course. Would I consider giving up all the things like Apple Pay (and transit cards), real LTE connectivity, voice control, Home Key, having my boarding bass on my watch,
etc. to switch ecosystem primarily to get better battery life? Not at all.