‘We didn’t set out to build a mechanical watch’: Garmin COO Brad Trenkle on how the new, super-premium Garmin Marq 3rd-Gen range packs serious smarts into a heritage watch design

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If you’re already a Garmin user, there’s a good chance you’re most familiar with its adventure and activity smartwatches like the Fenix, Instinct and Forerunner series’. They’re renowned for their practicality and a big well of features. However, the Garmin Marq series is its ultra-premium, style-forward luxury range that lets the company flex some different muscles, while still retaining the same featureset and software that people love.

The six models include the classy Aviator model, designed with complications for pilots; the debonair Adventurer; the serious military Commander; the Athlete with its energy drink colour accents; the ‘maritime blue’ Diver (new for this generation, replacing the seafaring Captain); and the exceptionally green Golfer.

The price of these watches varies a little between models, but you’re looking at $2,500 / £2,199 / around AU$3,500 and up, double that of the Garmin Fenix 9 Pro. A higher budget lets Garmin indulge in the kind of watch manufacturing touches that just can’t be justified in its sport and outdoors models, like polished ceramic bezel inlays, micro-knurled buttons and a full grade-5 titanium casing, with no significant plastic elements on show.

This alone requires feats of engineering to ensure the antennas have enough room to figuratively breathe — metal blocks their signal, and a fitness watch without reliable GPS or Bluetooth is not going to be much use at all.

The solution is slim strips of plastic polymer in the frame that you probably wouldn’t even notice unless you look close, and know they are there. These polymer strips are fused to the titanium metal of the casing ‘at nano scale’ using a process called nano-moulding technology. In effect it’s similar to the little non-metal strips in an iPhone’s casing, applied with what sounds like a pretty expensive procedure.

Garmin COO Brad Trenkle explained to me the company isn’t fooling itself into thinking it’s making a direct alternative to a Patek Philippe, Rolex or Audemars Piguet here.

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“We didn’t set out to build a mechanical watch that was designed to be passed down from from generation to generation,” says Trenkle. Smartwatches inevitably have a shelf life due to being a sealed unit with lithium batteries. But the way people use their Garmin watches means they have more longevity than some other kinds of consumer gadgets, according to Garmin’s own user data.

“Most users actually tend to use their Garmin watches longer than they they use their smartphone,” says Trenkle.

Making an ultra-premium smartwatch is different to making an heirloom analog watch. Case in point: the buttons, and how you add them to a watch designed to dive over 40 meters deep. Over the last few years Garmin has played around with button tech, a move forced by dive-ready water resistance becoming a common feature in high-end sport watches.

When the Garmin Fenix 8 arrived in 2024 there was a lot of talk about how watch’s inductive buttons made the series’s 40m dive-ready water resistance possible. It’s a design that means there’s no hole made in the casing to house the buttons.

“We have this wall of polymer that makes a complete seal between the watch case. There’s no gasket, and it’s just one piece,” explains Trenkle of the new Marq.

The style is ideal for hardcore water resistance, but not so great for the feel of the buttons. A Garmin Fenix 8’s buttons feel pretty spongy compared with other models. But in a classic Garmin Marq exercise of low-to-no compromise design, these watches have a mechanical clicker purely for the feel, combined with an inductive button for actual function. The result is perhaps what I noticed most clearly about the Marq Adventurer while wearing it: it has exceptionally bright but substantive button feedback.

The tactical Commander and scuba-friendly Diver relate to features like aircraft outboard systems and interfacing with dive equipment, but all six watches share some common upgrades. For example, while the Garmin Fenix 9 and Enduro 4 have shown 64GB storage is now the standard for higher-end Garmin models, the Marq Generation 3 has 128GB.

These watches don’t offer massively exciting ways to use that space beyond adding more maps, music, podcasts and audiobooks. But it’s an upgrade such a luxury watch surely deserves.

Similarly, when the second Marq arrived in 2022 I was half confident its unique magnetic charge interface would inevitably dip down to prestige series like Fenix. Years later, that still hasn’t happened, and now the Marq generation 3 has its own tweaked version of that standard — a four-pin magnet interface. Not more jamming in that classic Garmin charger bung, which would hardly befit a luxury watch.

A lot of the Garmin Marq’s design touches aren’t shouty, but they do add up to make the physical presence of these watches feel distinctly different to, for example, the Forerunner 970. I wore the 970 alongside the Marq Adventurer on a test hike, and could really feel the difference between the two watches.

Once you get deeper into watch specs, the Garmin Marq series starts to sound very familiar. These watches have 1.4-inch AMOLED screens with peak brightness of 3000 nits. There is no micro LED option, or any MIP display models.

All that changes in the display is a “borderless” design than lets the metal of the bezel reach right up to the start of the display panel. It’s a sleek look, but not an improvement I would necessarily have clocked without being pointed towards it.

All Marq models have a mid-table diameter of 47mm, and the same kind of Elevate V5 heart rate array used in other top Gamins (accurate as tested against a heart rate monitor and the Apple Watch Ultra 4). There’s a flashlight, support for ECG readings and battery life is rated at 18 days, or seven days with the always-on display mode engaged. Like the Fenix 9 Pro, the Garmin Marq also supports not just communication over 4G/LTE, but satellite too, when used with an InReach subscription.

Is a Garmin Marq “worth it” for the average Garmin shopper? Absolutely not.

These watches are here for the person who wouldn’t baulk at the price tag, let alone the rising costs of the Fenix family. It nets you that series’ best bits in a more stylish chassis, plus even more storage and model-specific features if you pick one of the specialised Marqs like the Aviator.

Which of the six is your favourite? Let us know in the poll below.

Garmin Marq Adventurer (Image credit: Future) Garmin Marq Athlete (Image credit: Future) Garmin Marq Aviator (Image credit: Future) Garmin Marq Commander (Image credit: Future) Garmin Marq Diver (Image credit: Future) Garmin Marq Golfer (Image credit: Future) Image 1 of 6 View Original

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Andrew Williams Andrew is a freelance journalist and has been writing and editing for some of the UK’s top tech and lifestyle publications including TrustedReviews, Stuff, T3, TechRadar, Lifehacker and others.

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