AW has Strain and Recovery

You know this battery is only related to software…

Of course it's not. It's about restrictions from smartwatch functions (mainly hardware) that people using garmin are wlling to accept since battery life is more important to them. But recent developments in solid state battery technology will have an impact to battery life that might reduce this advantage a lot.

And I believe that from this point a lot of people will change to real (androis or iOS) smartwatches. Might be that garmin will also add more smartwatch features to their watches too from that point, but the way they are handling their software problems with their premium smartwatches tells me that garmin will probably lose that competetion.

And for the sports functions, competitors like apple, samsung and google add more and more sports functions. And wit AI getting better we should remember that AI is trained better the more data you get. And I believe that garmin is going to lose in this point either.

Let's see what will happen...

Do you remember Steve Ballmer laughing about the first Iphone?

Let's see who will be laughing at the end.

I think you nailed some of the Garmin's issues: bugs, regressions and quality assurance problems are so frequent and spread that Garmin should rethink their approach to software development. For sure they are using a real time operating system which is working really well to reduce battery consumption while Apple and Google use a fully fledged operating system which, in the end, permits them to add more advanced functionalities leveraging a really solid and less buggy platform (to be fair, even a realtime os with well coded applications is rock solid but this is not a priority for Garmin, evidently). This will give them a great advantage when battery technology will improve.

To make the scenario worser, smart features require a deep integration with the mobile phone operating system and neither Apple nor Google want to open that much (maybe EU will change their mind). So Garmin has difficult times ahead but I think they are still in the position to improve a lot and survive: after all, even Apple which seems unbeatable today has its own set of issues. Innovation is lost: they missed several trains and while they are trying to close the gap, reality is they are lagging behind. Their approach: "A thousand of no for one yes" was working well when they had a great vision. Today, products like AW and iPhones are mere iterations and all of these "no" are impairing user experience instead of improving it. Do you think we’ll ever see a different form factor for AW? Or buttons? Or a better discoverability of the user interface? I’m not holding my breath.

You may argue Apple is just playing the Apple game here but I think that people and even the press are less prone to cry out for a miracle for every iteration of their products and this is a novelty in comparison to what was happening just 1 or 2 years ago. In this sense, they are in the same position of RIM: they are at the peak of their cycle just waiting for an outsider to create a very good alternative product/ecosystem. As you said, we'll see.

Apple will win in the long run . Garmin might offer better battey life but interface is not polished on $1000 watch .