On a walk with my son this week my forerunner 645 came suddenly off my hand. Turns out the strap housing has snapped off.
It's my second watch of this type after the heart rate monitoring failed on the prior one. This is only 18mths old.
I've complained to Garmin only to be fobbed off with this not being their fault and they don't see this as an engineering fault. However, having googled and now feel competently researched, this would appear to be a known fault so much so they have a replacement service costing £107.
I can find the first traces of this issue surfacing in January 2018 and increasingly more month on month. A simple google analytics search also suggests more people are googling on this topic which suggests increasing failure rates.
As a product manager professionally such data is gold dust but clearly Garmin fail to spot these trends - I suggest they start to look carefully at free data such as this and their own message boards where this topic has been discussed for 2 years - with equal frustration from other users.
@Garmin, to reply to my original message saying you understand my dissapointment I don't think is fair. You have no idea how frustrated I am, disappointed after putting faith in a product cost me £350 and angry that you seem to manufacture a product that is only fit for 18mth and in some cases 7months. Customer service is paramount and I sense your flippant response to me was a copy and paste.
You can do so much better than this, particularly when you know there is an issue but do not want to acknowledge there was a design fault.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Paul