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by apparent 162 days ago
> Hard to say this is true when Garmin watches are far more successful than Pebble

This may not be true for long, honestly. Pebble hasn't made watches in years, and I wouldn't be surprised if within 2-4 years they were selling more units than Garmin. The Pebble UI is a dream, especially compared to Garmin. I could never get my parents to get a Garmin, but a Pebble could totally work for them. Super intuitive, hardly needs charging, gives them notifications when they're in a different room than their phone, always-on/always-readable screen.

1 comments

Very unlikely. The reason Garmin watches are successful is because they've carved out an audience (athletes, health and exercise focused). Pebble might have a nice UI but most people would be better off with an Apple Watch or whatever the current flavour of the week is on Android
I think a lot of people bought AWs because they seemed like the right thing to get, integrated easily, and were more or less easy to use.

But most people I know who have AWs don't use most of the functionalities they provide. If you went up to 20 random AW wearers and ask them if they would give up a bunch of features they don't use (like the awful Siri assistant) in exchange for 15-30x the battery life, I think a lot of them would say yes.

Add onto that the fact that Pebbles are cheaper than AWs, and I think we're going to see a non-trivial number of people "upgrading" from AWs to Pebbles when the batteries start to degrade.

> like the awful Siri assistant

Ironically, I just talked to all my mates about our Apple Watches, and universally Siri on your wrist for setting timers and replying to messages with voice, completely hands free, was the killer app that everyone agreed on.

Setting a timer is as simple as bringing your wrist to your face and saying the amount of time.

I literally only use Siri on my Apple Watch, I’ve only triggered it accidentally on my iPhone and have the hot word disabled on all my other devices. Of course, all I ever use it for is setting timers and alarms on the watch, but still…