I'M OUT

What news?

Garmin, a company that now only cares about profit. Competitors are growing and offer products of equal or even higher quality at lower prices. Bye bye Garmin

Bye, and you’ve been a good representative for Garmin in a 15 years I’ve been on this site . i’ve seen you defend them for many years.

Garmin is updating the Fenix eight and 970. They are leaving out the Fenix  seven pro the epix pro 2 and the 965 which were watches produced within the last two years. in other words if you want the new features spend another thousand dollars

Do Polar and Suunto update their old watches with new features?

Suunto and Coros yes, Polar dont know

I fully understand your frustration. You payed top dollar for a watch that is no longer maintained in terms of features. 

I just bought a Quatix 7 Pro from Amazon for 594e. Garmin is still selling this model for 799e in Portugal, which is strange since it will no longer receive new features and the Quatix 8 has been launched. 
I searched a lot on the Internet and in terms of software the Forerruner 970 would make much more sense. The Fenix 8 was just outside my budget for 940e (I do not buy non sapphire watches, with the 970 being sapphire it makes me puzzled about the Fenix 8 non sapphire editions even exist). Also, the Fenix 8 Pro is supposedly around the corner, and possible happening the same as with Pro of 7 and Epix “any day now”. 

I really love the watch looks, could not stomach the “childish” look of FR970 and the plastic case. I always try to get good deals on previous generation hardware, I know it won’t have new features, but typically is well supported in terms of bug corrections (they just launched a new beta). 

So in the end I saved 350 euro versus the Fenix 8, got the features I value today and avoided buying a watch I don’t like just because of “support” or overspend on something that eventually is gonna take the same treatment when the Pro version is launched. I have no use for microphone and speaker (I had an Apple Watch and if anything it was just a PIA to always flush the speaker after a shower). The only thing I could miss is the progressive font size of the new software, my watch only has two levels. 

I believe this watch is going to last me a couple of years. Since I have a Edge 1040 and I primarily do road cycling (I do not run or swim, strangely enough I am not a water person at all!), the Quatix 7 Pro is a good companion to check data, see the time and get a week long battery life (more or less), which is 6x the battery burn time of my previous AW9 SS 45mm. I also have a WHOOP band for the serious metrics, and it trails very much closely to Garmin that AW ever did in sleep, HRV, vo2max and the like. 
Maybe there’s a reason more than battery life for Garmin to be selling so many watches. The metrics from AW are flawed, namely because they do not do 1s measurements of HR and seldom do the other metrics. Strangely this is supposed to help battery life, but alas, it does not last more than a day. 

So it is bad that Garmin isn’t going to introduce new features to this series, just 2 years after launch. However, the processing unit comes from the non pro era (2021?), and as seen on benchmarks, the Fenix 8/FR970/X1 series has the same. So they “could” do it. But engineers need to be payed every month and watches are not sold every year to the same person (at least not me!). I start to understand the WHOOP business model, where one is paying for features, not hardware. The hardware is free, but you need a subscription to use it. 

All the best!

Get over it! It's still supporting the watch just not adding new gimmicky software features. You arent missing anything! 

Not only will it not receive updates, but it leaves the Epix Pro with dozens of bugs and malfunctions.