> Watches with weeks-long battery life typically use something that is more akin to a powerful microcontroller with operating systems tailored to such low-end hardware.

This is what I'd assumed. But then I also assumed that's actually an exceptionally expensive and high resource approach to take compared to using higher level smartphone chips. By using lower level hardware, they're having to do more bespoke hardware design, and more bespoke low-level firmware and software creation, and also support all of that extra creation. This seems like the super expensive, heavy, slow way of building a smartwatch.

So I guess the "what's the deal" what's trying to understand how some random knockoff looking company ("Amazfit" in 2016) took the super expensive, heavy, slow way of building a smartwatch, and got better results than some of the largest most notorious software/hardware companies on the planet.

Ultimately, they took the pebble approach, and pebble also got a huge amount of backing and extra funding, time, support etc. and seemed to commercially fail. But Amazfit is still going strong.