Related
Options
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Was the Fenix 8 for us, or for the shareholders? A love letter and an unhinged rant.

2529455
9 months ago

I've been following the Fenix line for a few years now and I'm not sure I've ever seen a release that's been plagued with so many fundamentally product breaking bugs before.

I find it inconceivable that a product manager looking at what they shipped 2 weeks ago would think "Yep, that's it. It's exactly what our valued customers want". One can only assume that they knew that it wasn't ready and decided to ship it anyway because it's what the market was wanting to see given that sales have started to slow in their Outdoor division.

I feel like I've been one of Garmin's biggest advocates over the years, owning multiple watches and convincing a number of friends to shift over into the Fenix and Forerunner lines, but the Fenix 8 release coupled with the ongoing issues in the in the Fenix 7 line (e.g. it's been months since I've been able to synchronise my Spotify playlists without it timing out) are really starting to push the relationship that I have with this company. I'm at a point where I refuse to buy a new Garmin product in the first 3 months of release because we all know it's going to be a debacle, and I'm getting to the point where I'm not sure I can even trust my 2 year old watch on the adventures that I routinely undertake. Perhaps it would be fine, but the growing sentiment is that Garmin's software quality is so poor that it might not be worth the risk.

I'm betting I'm not the only one who feels this way at the moment, so Garmin, have a serious think about your strategy. Do you want to play the short term strategy and look after your stock price whilst burning customer trust, or do you play the long-term game and only release a product when it's truly ready?

Garmin, please. Your products have literally turned my life around - taking me from being a pizza eating, beer swilling slovenly couch potato to an ultra marathon runner and multi-day hiker. They've been absolutely transformational and I really want your products to remain in that place for many years to come. Please take the quality of your software and product launches seriously. Please don't wreck this trust.

  • 0 9 months ago

    You do not own a fenix 8 Series watch, right?

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to gaijin
    gaijin said:
    You do not own a fenix 8 Series watch, right?

    I do not. I'm still waiting for my F7 to regain the functionality it had at launch before I consider another Garmin product.

    I'm also just one customer and if I'm alone with this, then both and Garmin and yourself can happily ignore me. I don't even make the smallest of dents when it comes to sales after all.

    But, perhaps I'm not. Maybe I'm one voice in what might be a growing sentiment.

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to 2529455
    2529455 said:
    gaijin said:
    You do not own a fenix 8 Series watch, right?

    I do not.

    'Nuff said.

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to gaijin
    gaijin said:
    'Nuff said.

    I'm not sure what point you think you have made. Can you elaborate?

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to 2529455

    I think the point is that this is a user's forum. 

  • 0 9 months ago

    I actually had the chance to try the Fenix 8 briefly, but ultimately decided to switch to the Solar MIP version, which I had initially ordered. However, due to supply shortages with the MIP displays, I was able to cancel my order—and honestly, after reading through this forum and reflecting on my experience, I’m glad I did.

    The software quality issues with Garmin are nothing new. Big reviewers have pointed out time and again that this is a recurring problem with their devices, and it's become somewhat of a public secret. Unfortunately, instead of improving over time, the situation seems to have gotten worse. I started beta testing with the Fenix 6 Pro, then moved to the Fenix 7 and stayed on "stable releases". But even there, I eventually had to disable auto-updates after the issues introduced with version 16.xx.

    Reading these forums has only confirmed that my decision to cancel the order was the right one. There’s a pattern of unreliability that doesn’t seem to be going away, and at this price point, it's simply not acceptable. Garmin is advertising features that aren’t even fully implemented at launch. It reminds me of the Forerunner 645 Music—when it was first released, offline music wasn’t even available until half a year later.

    Garmin, please, get your act together. These products are premium, and your customers deserve a premium experience from the moment they open the box.

  • 0 9 months ago in reply to bw

    PS to that:

    Aparently, my opinion is unpopular in a world where people buy overpriced Teslas, where even the automatic windshield wiper feature is labeled as BETA... I just believe that a product labeled as premium and sold at a premium price should also live up to the premium standard; meaning premium quality in both hardware and software.

  • 0 9 months ago

    I can't justify paying 37% more than I paid for my Fenix 7 SS just a couple years ago and like twice as much as the Fenix 5 before that.

    Businesses used to be about keeping a customer for life by offering something newer and better for roughly the same price.  For this example, I think of a car manufacturer.  A loyal customer may end up by 10 of a thing over their lifetime.  It seems like Garmin has taken the notion of experimenting with how tolerant the majority of their customers are of their prices.

    At these prices I would rather own one watch for 20+ years, have a replaceable battery, and assurance that it will maintain feature parity with newer models over the following decade.  Essentially, like a regular timepiece.  All a Rolex does is tell time and it can do it indefinitely.  A Fenix has a wear item- the battery- and its full function relies on Garmin's cloud infrastructure.

  • 0 9 months ago

    I agree wholeheartedly with this post. I also am a current owner of the Fenix 8 AMOLED, an Epix Pro, Fenix 6, Edge 1040, Edge 1000, Garmin Swim 2, multiple older Forerunners, the Index scale, InReach Messenger, Taxc Neo 2T, and numerous heart straps and bike sensors.

    I’ve been pretty happy with the bike sensors and the earlier watches I owned. The bike computers have both worked pretty well, too. But the trend I’ve seen with Garmin’s products is that the software bugs (and hardware issues in the Tacx line) have gotten worse and worse in recent years, to the point where I’m honestly starting to look around outside of the Garmin ecosystem to see if switching might be an option in the future. 

    I love many aspects of the new Fenix 8. I think the touch screen and OS are more responsive than my Epix Pro, the battery life is wonderful, the sensors connect and GPS locks more quickly, etc. But the bugs and feature deprecations I’m experiencing are just baffling to me. I’ve now had the watch for several weeks and my naps widget STILL tells me I’ve napped a total of 8,166 years today. Is Garmin not embarrassed by this? As a software engineer myself with decades of experience, I would be mortified as a product manager to have shipped a product with such obvious bugs. And what makes it all worse to me is that Garmin is so lacking when it comes to communicating with customers about these bugs and missing features. Garmin: If you’re reading this, could someone please take 5 minutes out of their day to let us know when the naps widget might be fixed? Will it be this month? Next month? By the end of this year? How about the navigation screen in an activity that showed you ETA, distance, and time remaining to get to where you’re navigating to? It was on the Epix but it’s no longer on the Fenix 8. Was this very useful feature intentionally deprecated? Or is it a bug? Can you tell us anything?

    I’m thinking I’d like to give Garmin another few days to drop an updated release and then see what’s been fixed, but if some of the obvious and more egregious bugs are still there I’ll just return the watch and the several watch bands I bought.