Critical flaw: the aggressive auto dimming makes this watch unusable during and outside of activities as well

nope, it is not solved.

Just look at DC Rainmaker's latest reviews for various manufacturers: Garmin, Suunto, Polar.

What do most of them have in common? "Company X drops old and busted MIP for brand new AMOLED hotness."

If anyone in the comments wonders if MIP will stick around, DCR's replies look like:

- "That ship has sailed. Garmin forerunners won't be going back to MIP"

- "There isn't enough consumer demand. The market has spoken"

etc

And I don't think he's wrong. None of the players who entered the market more recently (Apple, Samsung) bothered to offer a MIP or LCD variant for any of their watches.

The problem is that the majority of people will base their purchasing decision on what's cool or what looks nice in the store. Even Garmin has a marketing site which helpfully explains that most purchases are made based on emotion and rationalized after the fact.

I have to admit that when I saw an Epix gen 2 at a recent running expo, I thought it looked so much nicer (indoors) than the my 955's MIP display. I've also tried Apple Watch and I have to admit the screen looks nicer (and it's a far superior smartwatch).

That other problem is that obviously the majority of customers don't actually need or care about seeing their stats at a glance without turning their wrist and waiting for the display to light up. Maybe they run by feel and/or they only use the watch to record runs and post to strava. Maybe they usually run in darker conditions so it makes no difference to them that MIP is truly always on in bright sunlight. Maybe they don't run intense workouts or races and don't feel the need for instant stats.

IMO anyone who wants a truly always on display in a lightweight plastic Garmin running watch had better buy a 255 or 955 and hold onto it for as long as possible. Maybe in 5-10 years, watches will use microLED or some other burn-in resistant display which also looks nice (with high resolution and lots of colors.)

I think with every technology shift, there's an interim period where people claim (rightly or wrongly) that the previous tech has several benefits which aren't present in the newer tech. But at some point the newer tech becomes "good enough" and eventually the previous tech disappears (or is reduced to extreme niche status).

What FlowState describes hits the nail on his head.

If you look at utmb athletics what they use. Sure, they use whatever their sponsor provides, but you see fenix and not epix. Why should that be? (https://the5krunner.com/2023/09/05/utmb-2023-the-pros-used-these-watches-the-winner-wahoo-rival-lol/)

Fact is, garmin marketing targets people with fomo. People who don’t judge watches on feature quality but on feature quantity. (And most reviewers also target people who just want more. Don’t care what as long as it is more. Reviewers sum up the featurelist and rarely talk about usefulness of features)

People who actually want to use their watch in situations where you want to look at your watch without changing your running/cycling position to much have bad luck.

Buy a forerunner 255/955 or a Coros while you can.

Elbo said:

(And most reviewers also target people who just want more. Don’t care what as long as it is more. Reviewers sum up the featurelist and rarely talk about usefulness of features)

Reviewers also rarely talk about bugs unless the product is in an egregiously bad state, some long-standing bug/limitation is finally fixed, or the company has supposedly changed their QA processes for the better. Basically we only hear good news, unless something is so bad that ignoring it would harm the credibility of the reviewer. Every high-end Garmin made in at least the past 6-7 years seems to have had a ton of bugs on release, but somehow we never hear about any of them outside of user reports. Yes, I realize there are a lot more users than reviewers, but when I bought a 935 at launch, I saw a ton of very obvious bugs with my own 2 eyes, and I don't think my usage pattern is unusual (I just use my watch for running and general daily activity tracking.) One pattern I have noticed is that they do seem to miss a lot of edge cases (usage scenarios which are valid yet comparatively rare).

Maybe Garmin has changed, but I still see ridiculous amounts of bugs, including stuff that was fixed in the past but mysteriously came back years later. It's enough to make me wonder whether they do regression testing and especially whether they use their own products.

I'd also go so far as to say some features are useless solely because of bugs. e.g. I've seen reports of alarms that reset themselves for almost ten years. If actually used my Garmin for an important alarm, I would definitely have a backup alarm method.

Is there some point where we stop saying "all companies have bugs" and start admitting that some companies may have systemic issues with bugs and usability?

Of course, in the case of this specific bug, the answer was often "well Garmin can't recreate that bug so there's nothing that can be done." While that may be true, that doesn't really help users who are experiencing the problem.

I say this as a software developer btw.

https://www.google.com/search?q=garmin+forums+alarms+resetting

I’m a fellow software developer. Maybe we see bugs as bugs in stead of glitches that occur from time to time. 

I don’t know what it is with reviewers. But they are not going to tell you, “your old watch is fine, the new one has more features but none is a must have or isn’t working very well. Come back in 3 years time.” That would kill their hits on advertising. Garmin marketing targets people with fomo, and so do reviewers. 

I stopped trusting the well known reviewers. For my old 935 they said, all is perfect. Well, it wasn’t. Same for my new 965. Specifically the amoled,  all is perfect. Again, it’s not.

Too bad, the positivity of reviewers is far more influential than complaining users on a forum.

Spot on. Reviewers and companies have aligned goals: keep you interested in new products. Bug reports do not attract attention, they don't sell products. Quirks and random glitches are not something they really want to talk about.

They're also not going to go against something that the industry has decided that it's going to pursue, no matter what. We saw that with phones and wonderfully stupid anti-features such as curved displays, which are now FINALLY being kinda phased out, introduced and promoted thanks to novelty and "eye-catchiness" alone. Heck, to me, even notches and hole displays are completely absurd. Who would have accepted to have a giant hole in a display 10 years ago? Yet here we are.

Amoled on sport watches is no different. Side by side with, say, the Apple watch, a MIP display is going to look dated even though for actual activities MIP is the superior choice in many (most?) cases. Garmin is addressing this, it can happily charge the Amoled tax, life is great. Reviewers are just going to go along with it.

Elbo said:

I’m a fellow software developer. Maybe we see bugs as bugs in stead of glitches that occur from time to time. 

Exactly. Real comment from a friend who got a new Fenix 7 a few months ago:

"I'm so annoyed. My Garmin keeps disconnecting from my phone. Do you think they got hacked?"

This isn't the first bug they've noticed (and misattributed to some temporary or random circumstance like garmin getting hacked as opposed to a problem in the software).

In this case (and in the case of the other bug), there were complaints from other users about the same thing, so I was pretty confident it wasn't a random glitch. Even without other complaints, I would still be confident.

The average user has no clue how any of this stuff works (even in principle), or about the difference between software and hardware, local vs cloud, or what "getting hacked" actually means. Like the stereotypical aunt or uncle who complains about "getting hacked" after they played some FB game which needs permission to scrape all their contacts in order to tell them which celebrity they resemble.

Also, tech companies (including the big ones) have successfully trained users to be accustomed to "random problems". If you can even get support (big if), the responses are usually along the lines of:

- "Have you tried turning it off and on?"

- "We can't recreate the problem"

- "You're holding it wrong"

- "Wow, that sounds annoying. Tell ya what, we'll replace the device for you" (To be fair, Garmin is very good at replacing dead accessories like foot pods and heart rate straps. Unfortunately, replacing a watch isn't going to solve an obvious software problem.)

I see the same attitude with "community gurus" for many devices and platforms (including Microsoft, Apple, and Garmin). If they don't immediately see the same problem you reported, they instantly assume you're doing something wrong and completely dismiss your complaint.

But as a software developer, I know better. For many years, I worked at a legacy tech company (even older and further set in their ways than Garmin), and I saw a similar pattern of annoying bugs and design issues that were easily predictable beforehand. I literally predicted certain kinds of (minor) issues years in advance, more than once.

But ofc managers and salespeople did not care. Most of the software developers did not care either, and I guess I can't blame them.

I work at a startup now, and although some things are better, there's still a lot of avoidable bugs and design issues.

ep013 said:

Reviewers are just going to go along with it.

I will credit DCR with telling people that if you're a cyclist who mounts your watch on bike handlebar, AMOLED probably isn't for you, since the screen will dim and there's no convenient gesture for you to wake it up. (Exact same complaint as above.)

But again, DCR will only point out the most egregious stuff, to preserve credibility (IMO). I will say that at least he goes farther than most reviewers, who are clearly only interested in clicks and very shallow surface-level "reporting". He has one fairly prominent competitor site which posts a ton of clickbait headlines and rumors, for example.

For tech in general, I can point to sites like Ars Technica, which used to be extremely in-depth and technical, and is now often reduced to posting advertorials which regurgitate marketing bullet points. Or The Verge, which has been 100% pro-Apple from day one. They will happily post articles about how you're a loser who deserves to be ghosted if you use android, while also explaining that capitalism is an existential threat to humanity.

ep013 said:

Reviewers and companies have aligned goals: keep you interested in new products

This is why I feel it's so disingenuous when reviewers push back against criticisms of shilling or insist that they don't accept consideration such as free products. "As always, I'm sending this review loaner device back and buying my own device at a later date." When you're as big as DCR, does it matter? Maybe it did in the beginning, when he was a little fish.

People (and groups) can have aligned interests without ever explicitly "colluding". It happens naturally all the time. I have a feeling that if DCR started criticizing Garmin non-stop, he'd no longer be provided with new Garmin products weeks before release so that he can drop full-length day 1 reviews.

ep013 said:

Heck, to me, even notches and hole displays are completely absurd

I kinda understand the utility of a notch or hole display, not for the notch/hole itself, but to allow the rest of the display to cover the whole phone. It's part of the same trend that started with the elimination of physical home / nav buttons on iPhone and Android.

Apple kinda proved that it's also about fashion when they added the notch to Macbooks. To be fair, they made the screen taller, so full-screen video plays without the notch, and you can even set the display resolution so that the usable area of the screen completely excludes the notch's vertical area (which stays black, so the notch is hidden). I actually don't change the resolution to exclude the notch, but I did install an app which changes the top part of the wallpaper to black so the notch is hidden is almost every case. I'm gonna guess (without evidence) that there's a subset of ppl who like the notch to be visible, so it's easy for others to tell they have a newer Mac.