Apple Watch vs Garmin Forerunner

After 3 months with an Apple Watch Series 9, switching to a Garmin Forerunner 265 taught me how much the intended user shapes every design decision in a product. Apple Watch tries to be everything at once: notifications, calls, music, fitness, wallet. Doing all of those things adequately but none of them exceptionally is the tradeoff. Garmin does fitness tracking and almost nothing else. Cadence, ground contact time, training load, VO2 max trends, race predictions — the depth of running data is significantly more detailed than what Apple offers. AMOLED display on the Garmin stays always-on and the battery lasts 13 days versus the Apple Watch's 18 hours, meaning charging happens every 2 weeks instead of every night. Physical buttons on the Garmin let me control workouts without touching the screen, which matters when your fingers are sweaty or you are wearing gloves. For daily life Apple Watch is better, the notifications integration, the app selection, the Apple Pay access, and for training Garmin is better. Selling the Apple Watch came down to realizing I wanted a watch that made me a better runner more than one that let me read texts on my wrist. Priorities question is what separates the 2 products more than any spec sheet can show.