As a fitness editor, I’ve spent the past few years ingrained in the Apple ecosystem, with the Apple Watch on my wrist, and the iPhone in my pocket.
I’ve become hooked on closing my rings, and I’ve even gotten over the low battery life compared to some of the best running watches on the market.
Yet despite trying all of the best Apple Watches, I often swap to a Garmin when heading out for my run. Why? Partly because of the battery life, but also because I prefer the experience of having a Garmin on my wrist when I’m running.
With the launch of the Garmin Fenix 8, however, I decided to unstrap my Apple Watch 10 for a month and wear my Fenix 8 full-time. Read on to find out what happened.
I ditched my Apple Watch 10 for the Garmin Fenix 8 — here’s my verdict
Here’s what happened when I ditched my Apple Watch 10 for the Garmin Fenix 8:
I didn’t miss the rings as much as I thought I would
I’m really glad Apple recently allowed users to pause their rings, as I find I have become pretty obsessed with closing them in the past. In fact, I didn’t wear my Apple Watch for six months after having my son, as I found it too stressful seeing how little I’d moved in the day while dealing with postnatal depression and raising a newborn.
This time around, I thought I’d miss the motivation of my rings reminding me to stand and stay active, but I really didn’t.
By nature, I’m an active person, and while I’m no longer running the distances I did before having my baby, I still make sure I get some movement in every day, even if that’s a walk along the river while he naps in his stroller.
The Garmin Fenix 8 still reminded me to move, and features like Body Battery actually gave me a lot more information than Apple’s rings, when it came to how ready I was for a hard workout.
Garmin’s Body Battery function looks at a number of different metrics to give you a ‘score’ out of 100 to estimate how much energy you have throughout the day. If you’ve slept well and recovered from your last workout, your body battery will increase until it hits 100. If you’ve run a marathon, then taken a long-haul flight, your body battery can hit a low of 5.
You’ll never actually hit zero, and you can definitely still function with a Body Battery score of 5, but you’ll probably feel pretty exhausted.
As any parent of a young child will appreciate, my Body Battery score is often hovering around 70-80 most mornings, as I’m still up a lot in the night, but this information is useful when it comes to how hard to push myself when training.
Speaking of sleep tracking, I really appreciated Garmin’s Morning Report, which gave me an overview of how well I slept. This information is available through Apple, but you have to dig into the health app to find it — something I never do.
I much preferred the running metrics
It’s unfair to compare the $429 Apple Watch 10 with my $1,099 Garmin Fenix 8 Amoled, as the Garmin is a lot more expensive, plus I’m entering a smartwatch vs sports watch debate.
There’s no doubt about it, Garmin has a host of advanced training metrics that just aren’t available on the Apple Watch yet. In addition to more in-depth performance metrics, the Garmin Fenix 8 has tools like the Endurance Score and Training Status.
More importantly for me, the Fenix 8 has recovery time information — something I’m paying more attention to as I return to running postpartum, especially as I’m not getting a lot of sleep.
As I’m not marathon training right now, I also appreciate Garmin’s daily suggested workouts, encouraging me to mix things up and push myself on mornings when I have recovered. I’ve also used the Garmin Coach tool to train for marathons in the past — something that’s still missing from the Apple Watch.
In addition to the metrics, I find the Fenix 8 — like most of the best Garmin watches — is physically easier to use on the run thanks to the physical buttons. I still find it tricky to use the Apple Watch 10 on a long run, as sweaty fingers and touchscreens just don’t mix.
From a smartwatch perspective, however, I did miss little things like being able to reply to messages from my watch or pause my podcast when I’d left my phone in the other room.
While the Fenix 8 is advanced for a sports watch, and things like the AMOLED screen made the watch amazing to wear, it still doesn’t compare to Apple’s smartwatch capabilities.
Both watches allowed me to track my menstrual cycle, but Garmin had this major difference
I use my tech to track my menstrual cycle and have used cycle tracking on both Apple and Garmin. Before having a baby, both accurately predicted my periods, but Garmin’s tracking went one step further, giving me hints and tips on how I should be training based on where I was in my cycle.
Wearing the Garmin Fenix 8 for days without a break gave me more accurate data and sleep scores, as often I remove my Apple Watch at night to charge.
You can read more about how to use the menstrual health tracking on your Garmin watch here.
I also found that Garmin had one big advantage over Apple when it came to my pregnancy — I was able to switch my Garmin to pregnancy mode, pausing my training status, and getting useful updates on my baby week-by-week.
The pregnancy feature gave me suggestions on how to switch up my training, how much weight gain was normal, and reminded me to drink more water. I could even have used it to time my contractions. When it comes to pregnancy, Apple is seriously lagging behind Garmin.
I only had to charge my Fenix 8 a handful of times
Over the month, I only had to charge my Fenix 8 a handful of times, compared to the nightly charge of my Apple Watch 10. The Fenix 8 lasts 10 days in smartwatch mode (this is reduced to four if you choose to use the always-on display), which is a huge improvement on Apple’s 18-hour battery life.
Wearing the watch for days without a break gave me more accurate data and sleep scores, as often I remove my Apple Watch at night to charge.
I found the Fenix 8 extremely comfortable to wear on my wrist — I opted for the 43mm version in rose gold and received a lot of compliments while wearing it.
It’s undoubtedly an expensive investment, and there are plenty of other Garmin Watches on the market that look just as great, and have a lot of the same metrics. But I’m hooked, and it’s enough to convince me to swap from Apple for good.
