What does Fenix 8 / Tactix 8 Need To Have To Make You Upgrade?

Totally agree. I'd like to add one unique feature that not many people use, but you can use a Fenix (and most other Garmins) without an online connection for weeks, without losing any data.

If you so desire, you don't even have to upload anything at all, you can review all sleep stats and HRV etc directly on the watch. 

Access to all the files is possible via USB, and for a large part these are in a documented FIT format. You can do your own processing of these files. 

The only way to lose me as a Garmin customer is removing that file access, but even then, I'll just hoard enough Fenix 7's to last me a lifetime.

For mic and smart assistance to work the watch has to be either constantly tethered to a phone and offload speech recognition to the app on the phone or have a much more powerful CPU and way more operating memory. More powerful hardware would be power hungry so that isn't going to happen - that way Fenix will lose its competitive advantage over other smartwatches. And being tethered to a phone is also of limited usability for an outdoor watch like Fenix. Furthermore, a mic would compromise waterproofness, so that is another reason we are unlikely to see that. 

I agree. For those reasons, I hope Fenix doesn't ever get a microphone. I just don't see the benefits outweighing the consequences.

The Venu series has had a microphone for years, and not a single one of us here on the Fenix 7 forum bought one. So it doesn't really seem like a microphone is quite as important to any of us as all the rest of the aspects that make a Fenix a Fenix.

A microphone without on-device voice command / speech-to-text processing is pretty pointless, in my opinion. You still have to have your phone on you, and if you have your phone on you, you can literally just talk to that, instead of to your watch. I can say "Hey Google, what's the weather right now" and my phone, still in my pocket, will announce the weather to me. So why do I need a microphone on my watch?

And if the watch is smart enough to process voice commands and speech-to-text, we'll no longer be able to keep our minimalistic OS and low-power processors. Garmin would have to open a whole can of worms changing to a "smarter" OS and high-power processor, something most of us definitely do not want. And without LTE, you'd still have to have your phone with you for it to perform any voice commands that require internet or cellular service, so a microphone without LTE is pretty pointless. 

A lot of people are hoping that the watch will have both a microphone and LTE, and therefore be able to autonomously execute voice commands over the internet and cellular networks without your phone, but I think that's really a "be careful what you wish for" scenario, because those things would come at a great cost - both in terms of product price, as well as battery life and performance. We'd end up with a Fenix that costs $1500 and has an ongoing subscription fee on top of that and has half the battery life. No thanks. If you want a watch with LTE that you can talk to, there's already dozens of watches with 1-day battery lives out there that can do that, don't wreck the Fenix by trying to make it be just another one of those.

Stable software, apparently 1k$ for 7pro doesn't cover for it.

They could always take a monthly fee to see advanced statistics.

I believe that the statistics part + hardware integration is the main product. Otherwise, if you split hardware and software - you can buy any watch (=just sensors really) and connect it to whatever service you prefer (strava, trainingpeaks, intervals.icu is also a great free alternative that I switched to since the horrible new connect web redesign). Until recently the good part about garmin was geting both software and hardware, integrated. But current prices don't justify the hardware, and there are many really great analysis tools that seamlessly pull garmin data, make better analysis and data presentation (again - intervals.icu).

When you ride on past "customer retention rate" to sell ***, as a business strategy, it wont be long till you lose your business. Competition, better and cheaper products keep multiplying. As Garmin lover for more than 10 years, I wouldn't buy it now.

I am curious about the competition. Which ones do you know of that are cheaper and better? I don't see spending a lot on a unit that constantly needs software updates.

Ah, the wonders of the free market! Thanks to competition, the prices of sports watches should stay nice and low, with manufacturers undercutting each other to win us customers. Everyone can afford the latest tech, and we’re spoiled for choice!

Oh, wait... why do the watches cost the same across allmost any store? And those “coincidental” price adjustments – what a surprise! It seems the market doesn’t regulate itself quite so well when monopoly power and price-fixing come into play. But hey, uokik.gov.pl/.../garmin-equipment-investigation-procedure-and-searches

You're saying Garmin has a monopoly when Apple and Google are both bigger players?