Garmin has announced a new generation of its luxury watch line, with the Garmin Marq Gen 3.

As in the last, which I wrote about all the way back in 2022 , the Marq range comes in multiple flavors, six of them, starting at $2500.

There’s the Adventurer, the Golfer, Aviator, Commander, Athlete and — new for this generation — the Diver, replacing the seafaring Captain of the last range. Each has a distinct visual personality, and each neatly refers to an audience segment Garmin caters for in its less luxurious, although at times only moderately less expensive, lines.

We’re asked to think of these as modern tool watches. They have all the substance of more practical models like the Fenix 9 Pro or Descent series, but with the budget taps turned on enough to allow for far more expensive finish elements and the development of some bespoke bits of industrial design.

My favourite of these is all about the buttons. Ordinary buttons are not conducive to strong water resistance, as you’re typically creating a point of possible ingress between the outside and inside of the watch. The Garmin Marq Generation 3 has 40m dive-ready water resistance across the range, making this issue all the more acute.

In previous watches, Garmin has used a somewhat more spongy-feeling “inductive” button style to allow for dive-proofing. But that wasn’t good enough for a series that’s about, on one level, “harking back to watch making tradition,” as Garmin says.

The solution is an indulgent piece of engineering that, some might say, gets close to going overboard in making the Marq feel right. The buttons have a mechanical clicker for that substantial but bright button feel, but the actual element making the press happen in the system is an inductive button underneath the clicker housing.

This means there’s no need for a path from the buttons’ workings to the actual inside of the watch, while providing far greater button feedback than Garmin’s other watches.

The lengths you have to go to in order to achieve low-compromise build are quite something, apparently. Another example is the thin layers of plastic polymer sandwiched between the otherwise all-titanium casing, which have to be positioned in harmony with the antennas in order for the GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to work properly.

Once again, Garmin also uses a completely different style of charge connection for Marq too, with a four-pin magnetic interface rather than the resilient but unglamorous 4-pin plug design shared across almost all of Garmin’s other designs.

But to some the real special stuff is the extra expense that goes into making the various Marq models look different to each other.

Garmin Marq: Meet the cast

Each of the different Garmin Marq Gen 3 designs also references its stated leanings on the watch face, and bears its own finish stylings.

Perhaps the most straightforward is the Marq Athlete, whose face bears markings for the wearer’s VO2 Max at the top half of the bezel, the remaining current recovery time on the bottom half. These indicators will of course be used in select watch faces.

The Golfer isn’t just exceptionally green, its markings represent a hole counter, used when tracking a golf session. Its bezel is polished ceramic, while the strap has a jacquard weave with Ceramic end links. But, yes, you had better appreciate the color green in order to get on with the Golfer.

A good-looking all-rounder, the Adventurer’s more contoured bezel provides compass markings — although of course the actual compass in the watch is a digital one and the bezel here does not turn.

Like the Golfer, the Adventurer has a Ceramic bezel linlay with a “fetching sunburst brushing” finish, while the buttons have a micro-knurled texture.

The watch includes an Italian leather strap, but it’s one with an HNBR rubber liner for greater real-world practicality. Classic Garmin.

Next up is the Diver, whose use of color is not far off the Golfer’s in terms of sheer bold pop, but in blue instead of green. It’s a Maritime blue shade, and the face markings are used, with one of the built-in software complications, as a one-hour timer — intended for dive sessions.

Perhaps the model most likely to picked most often not for its intended use is the Commander, the military pick. And it seems to have been designed with that crowd in mind, as while the jacquard strap has a camo-style pattern, it’s a subtle enough one simply to work as a stylish design in its own right.

Finally, there’s the Garmin Marq Aviator — the watch I decided was my favourite on first seeing the series, despite only having “piloted” a plane for a handful of seconds a couple of decades ago. And let’s be honest, being handed the yoke by a pilot in training once doesn’t really count.

The Aviator is a fetching watch, though, with a polished black ceramic bezel bearing 24-hour UTC time markings. It’s a simple and clean design.

Of course, the Garnin Marq you pick probably shouldn’t be determined just by the look. Most of these models have their own bespoke features too, related to diving, flying, tactical/military operations or, on the much lighter side, golf.

Their base feature sets are otherwise at least on a level with the recent Garmin Fenix 9 Pro. They all support LTE mobile internet for communications without a phone, as well as satellite — features shared with only a handful of Garmin watches, ever, including the Fenix 9 Pro.

Core features aren’t really the point with Marq, but a few do bear stating. These are 47mm watches with 1.4in OLED screens, 128GB storage and up to 18 day battery life.

Now, onto the important stuff. The Garmin Marq watches are available to order, with a lead time of 5-8 weeks for the Adventurer, Athlete and Diver, or 8-12 weeks for the Aviator, Commander and Golfer.

The Garmin Marq Athlete is the most affordable, at $2,500. Next up is the $2,700 Adventurer and then the $2,800 Golfer. No surprise here, the more specialist feature models top off the range. The Aviator, Commander and Diver all land at $3,100.