Everyone trusts hardware wallets to secure cryptocurrencies, but how can the authenticity of a hardware wallet be verified so that it has not been tampered with or compromised during production or distribution?
That's a tough one
It's recommended to only buy hardware wallets directly from the manufacturer (and never from third parties). After that, you can follow the
authentication process on their website. But indeed, it's one of the things I never feel 100.0000000% sure about. It's too much of a black box.
Which one do you recommend hardware wallet or air gapped wallet?
It depends on your usage, and skills. You could go extreme and setup an air gapped hardware wallet, with a seed created from dice rolls. But for the average user, usually a hardware wallet is the safest
compromise. Unless they enter their seed words on a
recovery phishing website, there's no protection against that.
A hardware wallet is a lot more convenient to use than an air gapped system. You don't have to limit yourself to just one wallet.