Forerunner 955 discontinued?

Wayne C said:

the argument of do you actually need a screen?  when all your data will synch to your phone or your internet browser, , whoop users dont seem to have an issue of no screen, arguably the screen is a distraction, you can obsess about the data its spitting out constantly... 

Clearly lots of runners, even fast runners, use their garmin almost exclusively as a strava syncing device.

Personally I feel like I "need":

- time, distance, pace, HR (for the entire activity and the current lap)

- physical buttons to easily start/pause/lap activity without looking, double-tapping, swiping, twisting a crown, or pressing two buttons at once

But a timex is good enough if you're training on a track.

And I *want*:

- real-time lap history, so I can look at my previous intervals during a workout (I made my own app for this)

- navigation (I get lost easily during long runs)

Music is a nice to have although I rarely use it.

how much tech do you need? arthur lydiards New zealand athletes set NZ records in theh 1960's, that in some cases have lasted until recently..... they didnt have much tech back then at all... snells 800m record was set on grass, in very basic shoes with no foam in them.... he didnt have any sort of fitness tracker,, he became a physiologist and said himself physiologists wernt any help in improving athletes performance....  when i first got  a heart rate monitor, after a while i stopped using it because i ended up being able to tell what my heart rate was within 5 bpm based on my level of exersion after becoming familiar with my heart rates... Kip Keino  olympic gold medalist on the track was asked about his training regime, he said he goes out and runs until he's tired.... theres needs , wants and nice to have.... do you feel lost without your sports tracker now?   how much faith do you put in your training readiness data? your body battery? your sleep data?  

Again I don't disagree. I know an elite marathoner who ran 10 years ago with a timex, and more recently, one elite marathoner publicly mentioned that they preferred timex to Garmin bc when they tried a Garmin during a race, it messed up their pacing (since GPS pace is not accurate.)

When I started running ~10 years ago, I took the subway downtown to run a St Patrick's Day 5k race (my first 5k ever). A bunch of other runners were discussing their Garmin watches. I thought it was wack af bc why would you wear a GPS on your wrist????

After recording the race using the Nike+ app on my phone, I immediately realized one way a watch would be better. I would be able to start / stop the activity timer exactly when I wanted to, instead of fumbling with my phone's touchscreen. Yes, I realize that having an "accurate" record of a 5k fun run is not important at all.

And when I started doing long runs (like 16k - 20k), I realized that I would prefer to have a record of the routes I took so I could take them again. I also realized that navigation would be really useful for someone like me who gets lost easily.

I also very quickly stopped taking my phone with me during runs, bc the additional weight was very annoying.

So nobody needs all of this tech, especially not a hobby jogger like me, but it's nice to have. I went from manually recording my treadmill training runs on a spreadsheet to outsourcing the data collection to garmin. Nobody told me I had to track my runs, it was something I wanted to do bc I was new to running and I wanted to track my progress.

Someone I know -- who recently won a 5 miler -- ran with a 235 for years, but he recently upgraded to a 255 (again he avoided a 265 on my advice, as he agreed that he didn't want to change his "glance at watch" routine during hard workouts.) Did he need that new watch? Probably not, but I bet it feels good to have a new watch.

Again, the observation that many runners (including fairly fast and competitive runners) use their watch mostly to sync with strava kinda proves your point that nobody needs the tech. They may not be looking at their watch during a workout and they're probably not looking at any of the advanced metrics. I've talked to coaches (also fairly fast, if not subelite / elite, runners) who sheepishly said they didn't know how to use 90% of the stuff on their Garmin. My response to that was "why feel bad if you don't need any of that stuff?"

But that's part of the consumer mindset - we feel guilty if we paid a bunch of money to get a ton of features that we never use.

Wayne C said:

 how much faith do you put in your training readiness data? your body battery? your sleep data?  

Anywhere from "it's a random number generator" to "hmm sometimes the trends reflect how I'm feeling".

Kinda like how for me, Garmin VO2 Max is meaningless from an absolute standpoint, but it does reflect my relative fitness (it goes up when I get fitter, and it goes down when I lose fitness.)

Wayne C said:

how much tech do you need?

Counterargument (not related to Garmin): tech such as supershoes and wavelight has enabled marathoners and track runners to smash records

ofc it's debatable whether this is a "good" thing, but to quote Douglas Adams:

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I will also say that Garmins have objectively improved in the past few years. Given that you want to use a Garmin (or any other sportswatch) in the first place, a more recent Garmin would clearly be better than a 10-20 year old Garmin.

I've used a Garmin from ~10 years ago where the blister-type buttons were very hard to press (it was almost physically painful at times), and would break very easily. I don't think there's any modern Garmin (or even a Garmin from 5-8 years ago) which has a similar problem with its buttons.

And I've obviously seen pictures of the huge Garmin bricks from ~20 years ago that nobody would want to use today.

I'm sure I'm biased, but no runner really "needs" anything better than a 235. (I do base this on the fact that I know lots of fast people who use a 235 or similar watch from the same era.)

Anyway, all of this goes back to the argument that Garmin basically had to adopt AMOLED bc they needed a way to convince users to buy new (and more expensive) watches.

someone put a video out on youtube claiming some of the newer metrics on newer garmin watches are more speculative in their data than anything else and shouldnt be believed, research doesnt back up that training readiness and HRV are that objective.. how do you actually feel?  your watch says you're doing great but you dont feel that way or run that way?   accurfate sleep tracking is notiriously difficult,,, accurate tracking is done with electrodes placed all over your scalp... .my watch may say i've had a crap nights sleep but i may feel great, or visa versa.... 

FlowState said:

BTW, even Garmin doesn't publicize things like CPU speed, the presence of a GPU, or RAM.

Nor GPS chipset used! That would like really make sense. I don't know where people get the information is it MediaTek or Sony or what ever the MediaTek is nowadays called.  And that would kind of be really interesting thing to know.

For phone comparison, I think for me, the #1 tech specs is the measurements! I want my mobile to be usable with one and and pocketable, but like I'm really SOOL on that part. No one cares and apparently they don't even sell but there's a niche group that would like these things and really aren't given good options. One could see the people wanting MIP to be similar group. 

jmto said:

One could see the people wanting MIP to be similar group. 

At least you can buy a 255 or 955 today and conceivably keep it for the next 10 years, similar to people who still run with a 235 today. (Again this assumes that Garmin Connect will still be around for the next 10 years, but even if it isn't, I imagine 3rd party services will continue to accept manually imported FIT files, and even if they don't, it will still be possible to save FIT files to your computer and analyze them with 3rd-party scripts/apps. This is one of the benefits of Garmin's old-school design where you can use the main functions of the watch without a phone or internet and access most of the filesystem through a computer, whereas the newer way is for everything to be a locked-down black box which becomes useless once the backend cloud service goes away.)

I can't imagine anyone using a 9-10 year old Apple Watch, iPad, or iPhone today. Even if you use an Android, it's probably 5-6 years old at most.

But the fact that many people do keep their Garmin for 5-10 years is probably one of the reasons Garmin had to switch to AMOLED (along with the fact everyone else is doing it.)

jmto said:

Nor GPS chipset used! That would like really make sense. I don't know where people get the information is it MediaTek or Sony or what ever the MediaTek is nowadays called.  And that would kind of be really interesting thing to know.

I think people either make educated guesses or do teardowns.

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2022/05/garmin-forerunner-955-solar-review.html

In the case of COROS, they’re using the MediaTek/Airoha chipset (AG3335M), and Garmin confirmed they are also using Airoha as their supplier for all their units (Fenix 7 Sapphire units/Epix Sapphire/FR255/FR955/Tactix 7), and that it’s the same chipset that is in the Fenix 7/Epix Sapphire units. While Garmin won’t disclose which exact chipset they’re using, it’s incredibly likely it’s the exact same AG3335M chipset, since practically speaking it’s the only public Airoha chipset that matches the specs for what Garmin needs.

http://www.f-blog.info/garmin-fenix-7x-solar-teardown-non-destructive/

AIROHA ARM AG3335MN is the GPS (We should prefer to say GNSS nowadays.) chip of the device.

jmto said:

For phone comparison, I think for me, the #1 tech specs is the measurements! I want my mobile to be usable with one and and pocketable, but like I'm really SOOL on that part. No one cares and apparently they don't even sell but there's a niche group that would like these things and really aren't given good options. One could see the people wanting MIP to be similar group. 

Yeah Apple got rid of the iphone mini as apparently nobody wants a small phone anymore. And years ago, Android led the charge on big phones before Apple followed. It makes sense as more and more ppl started to use their phone as their primary media consumption device. I used to have a midsize phone, but I jumped on the big phone bandwagon when I started travelling regularly for work.

So as with MIP, if you want a small phone your main option is to buy an older phone and hang on to it for as long as possible. (Maybe if you wait long enough, the market will cycle back to a point where small phones are cool again.)