New 965 - Is it a joke ?

If you are not so quietly setting light to your flagships you are almost certainly razing your entire navy.

It speaks to a lack of engineering control. In contrast to many spats on the interwebs this is a situation where a bunch of grown ups are turning up and saying "yeah... that's total balls, mate."

When I buy a 955 (and not a much cheaper sport watch with just pace, hr and gps support) it's because I'm interested in collecting advance data and the sport science behind the watch .

And all of that is broken on this watch .

I hear that. I got the 955 primarily for multi-band and map support (I use it to help edit OSM). If I could get those on a smaller, less expensive device, I’d be all over it. So I definitely understand your frustration. 

To my original point, and I’m sure we’re all in agreement here, Garmin has really dropped the ball in regards to keeping us updated on bug fixes. If they really aren’t going to interact on these forums, then they might as well save some server expense and shut them down. 

This whole discussion really isn't about you - it's about Garmin screwing customers over by outdating products within nine months of release and leaving them broken. But since you brought it up, I just read your wrap up of the Instinct 2. That comes off as you recommending the watch even though the software is critically broken with daily crashes. To me that's untrustworthy. You're basing the verdict on the hope that Garmin will fix the problems, which is not the way to go about things as a reviewer. You can't separate hardware from software, because both are critical to the use of the watch. A review like that is exactly why some of us don't trust your reviews and look at you as part of the Garmin system with your affiliate selling of their products and all.

I will read your take on the 265 when that goes online and see what you think the release of that watch says to the users of the broken 255. They don't fix it and even go the extra mile to NOT bring training readiness to that watch as a sign of good faith - they are clearly done with it.

The fact that there are a ton of users who use a product in a fairly simple way and never use the features having issues doesn't take away from the fact that the product itself DOES have them...

If you only do your runs and bikerides, see the distance is plotted and your heartrate is there then sure... it works fine for your usecase. You'd might as well buy a much lower end model, but ok. But then claiming the product itself is fine is nonsense, it works fine for your specific usecase.

I bought this exact model for specific reasons, 1 being the maps... When it was released it was broken as it was impossible to select a location on the map itself to navigate to. They fixed that, but now navigating to a saved location is broken. That is not something 'that only happens to a nr of users'... it happens to all users who actually use it. Many just never do and don't know it's broken. I also don't use it everyday, but do every now and then and I always do when I'm away for a weekend or on holiday.

Lactate threshold detection, I train by lactate threshodl and no... I don't take the values reported literally but they DO act as a guideline. When I get fitter the values go up, and vice versa. IIn that way I can use just the watch for proper training and just do an actual test every so much time. But now it doesn't even autodetect anymore.

Sure, i can do a guided test every so often but that's not what this watch promised.

These are objective bugs, things they broke during updates and now we can only hope they fix them at some point. In the meantime they just keep on releasing new models (not an issue per se) while the previous model is not even working as advertised (that IS an issue).

And "If your that serious about your training you have a coach, or do lab tests"... Well, why even bother with an advanced watch then right? Who needs OHR because if you really care you'll need a strap, who cares about the metrics because they're off anyway, who needs sleep detection because it's incorrect, who needs GPS becvause it's not precise anyway, etc.

This is a high end watch for 'the serious athelete'... Time Garmin takes it serious as well. We paid quite a bit of money and what we, the real more indepth users, get in return is lacking to say the least.

I completely understand there are plenty of less demanding users who don't run into or care about these things, but that doesn't make them go away...

Tbh i'm also frustrated about this. They should just fix their product and then come with something new. But that's not how captalism works. Probably gonna send mine back and ask for a refund. 

If you don't like brussel sprouts, don't buy some.

I'm old enough to have train with a mechanical clock watch, I trained with the first polar HR monitor and I switch to the Fenix brand to the Forerunner (945LTE and then 955) because I prefer to have the nice gps track on the 250 track I train on rather than the wonky Fenix one. On a track, i simply use my 955 as a clock watch and not as a gps while training, because I know, the seconds that I run for 50, 125 or 250m wont lie.

I train for races between 5k road to 80km trail, I know the LTH on the watch is crap, last time I checked it said 5'05/km which is stupid since I can run 42'/10km and 1:35'/semi. I dont give a damn about a figure that I know wont be right until you are medically tested for it on a treadmill along with blood sampling.

This is why they need to switch to unified code/coder base. Having different teams working on watches with the same internal hardware is madness. Removing software features to meet a lower price point is actually resulting in more costs/bugs.

"And perhaps more importantly, over the last few years, the software quality has increased substantially, largely through open firmware beta programs that go on for months."

Open firmware beta bugs are ignored, and then you have to resubmit them when they release a new version with minor updates (without a proper change log).