Display Average Heart Rate during activity

Yeah, they want you to buy a more expensive watch....

As this is one of the most important physiological pacing metrics,

If you say so. Personally, I don't see how up-to-now Average Heart Rate is of much value to pacing, since the idea of running in (say) HR Zone 2 is to stay inside the zone throughout that interval or activity as intended, and not simply maintain an average HR in that zone including by deliberately falling out of that zone from time to time as required to [/counteract/] earlier errors in one's pacing.

I was frankly astonished to learn it was not available on this watch despite the unit obviously recording the data.

It would have been kinder to yourself if you opted to be surprised from reading (the relevant page in) the Owner's Manual before purchase.

Thanks for the replies. I’m a cyclist, not a runner, so ave heart rate is important to judge efforts on a long ride. I choose this watch as it has a specific cycling function...no one can keep in a ateady zone up a steep ascent. I had a cheapo FR70 which had the ave heart rate function. Would it really be so hard for Garmin to program it in to a future update?

I'm guessing it wouldn’t be hard at all. But they’re not gonna do it (I’m guessing), because they want you to buy the more expensive watch. It's just my 2 cents, but I think the barrier here has nothing to do with what's technically possible, it's all about marketing.

Garmin has been known to remove higher end features from midrange watches, but they’ve also done the opposite more recently. The 410 had courses, 610/620/630 did not. But now the 645 has courses again. Does any of that make any "sense" or seem fair? Probably not. You would expect the newer/more expensive watch to have all the features of the cheaper/older watches. But then again, most of those watches came out before I even started running a few years ago, so if I wasn't interested in Garmin tech, I wouldn't even know or care.

But the key thing I’ve noticed is that when high end features trickle down to midrange, they’re usually added to the next generation of watches, so you’re buying a new watch either way. The 220 got some features from 610, and the 230 got some from 620. And the 645 is almost like a 935. None of those watches got features from the current generation high end after they were released, though. The 220 never got any 620 features.

I work in software development, so I’m pretty familiar with how this kind of market segmentation works. Yes, you pay for hardware differences, but you also pay for software differences. And you’re not paying for the “effort” it takes to implement a feature. Usually the more expensive version of a device or app is developed first, and the cheaper one is created simply by removing software and hardware features. And if the difference is a $0.50 part and some engineering work that was “already done”, you can guess the price difference is not $0.50.

It’s the opposite of how we all imagine (and wish) it would work: you pay $X to get $X of “value” and when you pay more, you're paying in proportion to the "effort" or "work" it took to implement those features. I even have coworkers who look at the competitors products and say things like Model X costs twice as much as Model Y but you don’t get twice as much features. Unfair! But they ignore the fact that our company does the exact same thing. Because we all have an idea of fairness that doesn’t match how companies operate.

It’s just like if you buy the iPhone with more storage, you pay so much more of a premium than the cost of the flash memory. Or how a premium android costs so much more than an off brand, even though it doesn’t seem quite worth it.

To be clear there’s nothing wrong with this, except that in certain cases it pisses the customer off. (I’m not talking about extreme cases where amazon shows different prices to different people). They’re just trying to figure out what different customers will pay for different watches. And they have a lot of costs (marketing, advertising and research/development) that go beyond engineering and manufacturing of an individual watch model.

One of my favourite examples is 230 vs 630: the price difference was hundreds of dollars, but all you really got in the 630 was a touchscreen (ppl didn’t even want this), running dynamics and custom sport profiles with greater data customization. And maybe a few tiny features nobody cares about. Did it really cost them hundreds of dollars extra per watch to put those in? Of course not. They just designed the 630 and removed some features to get the 230. Maybe they lost money on the 230 and got it back on the 630. Or maybe it was all pure profit. Either way, customers can't change the fact that Garmin decided what features go into each of those watches and probably wouldn't change their minds afterwards. Was there are any chance in hell that they would add a single feature from the 630 to the 230 after the fact, even though technically it would cost them nothing? No. Because it could actually cost them money in lost sales of the 630, and just as importantly, because they had absolutely no reason to. For me, the huge thing about the 630 was the ability to have multiple run profiles, for intervals, races and long runs, so I could have different data screens and different settings. Not really "worth" the price difference, and Garmin could've added that to the 230 -- if they wanted to, which they don't.

TL;DR, maybe the FR35 is technically more advanced than the FR70, but they probably decided that someone like you would be willing to pay more for average heart rate, so that feature is gone. Or maybe they actually had some technical reason for "removing it" (which is doubtful), in which case it's not coming back either. It sucks but that’s the way it works.