955 - now in maintenance period?

This is what I just wrote on the 965 forum, that's my guess and applies to 955 as well:

The 970 has quite a lot different hardware than 965 (GNSS chip, optical HR sensor, etc.) and a user interface that is closer to Fenix 8 than 965. Looking at what Garmin has done earlier in such situations, I wouldn't hold my breath for Garmin to trickle any of the new features to 965. Some minor things might happen, but probably none of the major new sellings points of 970.

7dfcd1938c0146f1804397d33ddc9c14 said:

What do you think?

Definitely would make sense from the perspective of a product manager  - Forerunner 955 is feature rich and has had its share of backported stuff since release, now it is time to exclusively keep some features as a selling point for the new generation.
And also from the perspective of the software development teams - the (obviously) limited capacity is needed for development of new features and bugfixing along with it on the new generation, backporting to old generation is too much effort now, so concentrate on bugfixing those.

So yes, I think you are right.

Personally I also think, the FR 955 has more than enough features, I don't need new stuff. Also the UI is allright and has had some little change and polishment over the time, I am not missing something. They can keep the updated UI to the new models, that is fine with me.

I just hope they will really keep on bugfixing for some time and maybe along with it keep updating the subsystems (like GPS, ETE and LHA) to benefit from little corrections that have been made there.

Bitti said:

The 970 has quite a lot different hardware than 965 (GNSS chip, optical HR sensor, etc.)

Optical sensor is right, but is the GNSS chip really a new one? Any sources?
In another part of these forums I read, that somebody was sure, that at least the SoC of the new Fenix 8 series and the Forerunner x70 is not much different to those of Fenix 7 and Forerunner x55/x65 - but of course I don't know if there is proof for that.

Of course no one has been able to do a teardown yet and Garmin doesn't publish the chip they use. But I think the speculation of a new GNSS chip comes from the new battery life figures etc. See under "Battery life differences" in the link below, it also contains a link to information about the GNSS chip they started to use in Fenix 8.

the5krunner.com/.../

before of thinking about new features i prefere to have some better battery life, gps precision, HR accuracy, bugfixes.. etc

why always new features, that only 0.001% will use

I would guess that they will perhaps have another time frame of bug updates but I would not expect any new features going forward.  Let's be honest, it was released in 2022.  We've gotten more than enough features in that time span.  This is the norm.