I lost faith in Garmin

On 6/6/2022 i decided to change my vivoactive 4 with a garmin forerunner 955 solar. I would run my first Marathon here in Greece and i wanted to make an investment and thats what i did. I couldnt be happier with the watch and i was mainly using it for running/hiking and sleep data (also managed to do a sub 4 first marathon, yay me!)

The watch even though its been 2.5 years since i bought it, hasnt even fallen from my hands, i was wearing it at all times (except when i was swimming) and i never had any issue with it. 4/5 days ago i get a prompt to update it to 21.19 and i connected it with my PC to do it through garmin express. So after the update (and a big map update) my watch has been freezing continiusly and especially when i sleep. Sometimes i have to connect it to a power source and try holding the power button for 3/4 times for 60 seconds before it comes back.

I spoke with Garmin Support and a guy called Brian in North America (very polite and professional) using the chat in Garmin.com. I told him that i tried everyhting, reseting, restoring to deffaults, deleting all external apps/watchfaces and he told me that the watch looks like it got updated correctly and i might need a replacement although he cannot arrange it and i need to contact Garmin Support here in Greece.

So i spoke with Greece support and they told me that it sounds like a hardware issue (how? everyhting happened after i got the latest update!!) and the only option i have is to pay 205 euros (half the price to buy a new forerunner 955 here!!) to get a refurbished one (!!!!).

Investing 600 euros back then and 2.5 years later (6 months after the warranty expired...), after treating the watch in the best way possible (theres not even a single scratch on it) i have to pay another 200 euros to get a identical refubrished watch with 3 months of warranty.

I am beyond dissapointed with Garmin! I decided to move to Coros and never look back!

  • One of the main problem in my case is that I can't get a lactate threshold estimate anymore since the end of last november (that means just before the update...)

    I just looked it up, it is not directly connected to the update.

    I had a threshold update with 21.19 on 10th of December, after a hard run, automatically. So it seems like it is not generally broken.

    It is indeed strange though, that I also have had no updates for me since then, despite having had a couple of similar hard runs since then. I would at least expect, that there is an update/refresh of the threshold, even if the estimated values do not change! It seems not plausible to me, that there has been NO threshold been detected for four weeks+, if it works automatically.

  • That's curious... In my experienced all the problems started with the update at the beginning of last december...

    Whatever is the 21.19 update or not the cause for this mess (only a coincidence?), I believe Garmin should let users do the LT guided test back AGAIN and let also users decide whether to accept or not new values, just exactly how it was before 21.19 update.

    Before that bloody update I usually got LT updates almost weekly, at the end of guided tests or particularly intense workouts/runs (with changes of rhythm, etc).

    Now it's almost two months that there's no way I can't get updated values...