I have a 645M that's almost 4 years old (purchased Jan 2018). It has outlasted by a factor of 2x my previous smart watches in terms of taking physical abuse. It still has nearly a week of battery life when not using GPS, and variable if using GPS.
The one drawback to it is that on iOS, the notifications suck. I have no control over what apps can send notifications to my watch; its all or nothing. Back when I had a Pixel on Android, I could control which apps could send notifications to my watch. I'm assuming there is some API limit to 3rd party watches in the Apple ecosystem that prevents Garmin from being able to filter out notifications.
> The one drawback to it is that on iOS, the notifications suck. I have no control over what apps can send notifications to my watch; its all or nothing. Back when I had a Pixel on Android, I could control which apps could send notifications to my watch.
I have experience with Apple Watch since Series 3, and what you say about notifications isn’t true (if I’ve understood it right). If you go into the Watch app on the iPhone, then into Notifications and into the specific Apple app, you see a “Mirror my iPhone” and a “Custom” option. For third party apps, you see the list below (in the Notifications screen) with a toggle for mirroring your iPhone (or not). You can control this for each app. The scheme for third party apps is not (yet) as rich as it is for Apple apps, but you don’t have to suffer through every app on the iPhone where you have setup/allowed notifications also sending notifications to the watch.
I'm talking about a garmin watch, not an apple watch. Either the Garmin software is to blame, or Apple is not giving them the API access they need to send through only the desired notifications.
The one drawback to it is that on iOS, the notifications suck. I have no control over what apps can send notifications to my watch; its all or nothing. Back when I had a Pixel on Android, I could control which apps could send notifications to my watch. I'm assuming there is some API limit to 3rd party watches in the Apple ecosystem that prevents Garmin from being able to filter out notifications.