Heads up! The big Garmin annual spring sale has started, with $200 off the Fenix 8 (first sale to date!), $100 off the Edge 1050, Forerunner 965 at $499, the Forerunner 265, the new Instinct 3, and countless other Garmin products including inReach Mini 2. Plus the Apple Watch Ultra 2 Black Titanium is on sale, and some Suunto & Wahoo product deals too. Full list & thoughts here!
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Just curious thoughts about what might happen first, Garmin releases an Enduro for smaller wrists, or Suunto releases a new Vertical with their updated on wrist heart rate sensor? I’ve narrowed down my search to these wishlist items. 😀
Thanks!
That’s a tricky question. Frankly, I have no idea. I feel like Garmin thinks/believes there isn’t a market for smaller sized MIP based displays in the ultra segment (beyond Instinct series). I think there’s probably some truth to that, in terms of the market size Garmin now needs to justify making a product.
If we look at UTMB finishers (for the full-length one, the one that would justify the battery needs), only 12% were women in 2023 (first stat I found). And of course, some portion of those will be fine with medium sized MIP units (and inversely, some portion of men will prefer smaller units).
Whereas Suunto has a bit more flexibility on what it takes to ‘make it worth it’ for them (even moreso applied to COROS too). Of course, as always, Garmin *hates* the idea of someone stealing their lunch. So eventually, if the demand is there, Garmin will make a smaller unit with those features. But it make take an iteration or two. I’d say it’d be interesting to see in a Fenix 9 (or whatever it’s called), if they bring back the smaller Fenix S sized MIP unit or not, which they ditched for Fenix 8. If not, then I’d argue that fate is sealed.
Where can you see breathing variations? My Forerunner was updated to include them a while ago but for the life of me I can’t figure out where is this data located.
It’ll show up in two places:
1) In Garmin Connect , under the same page as sleep stats (look at left side).
2) On the watch, within the sleep stats section for last night, akin to things like sleep phases/stages
Note that it does require PulseOx be enabled (during sleep), otherwise it won’t show up.
Is it rolling out in stages? I have it now on my 265S and I got the email noting it is also rolling to the 255 and Venu3.
My husband hasn’t gotten the notices I did (has pulse ox on already) and neither of use sees a way to display the info in connect. Don’t want to bother my Dad about it if it’s not 100% up and running.
Looking at Garmin Forums (and my own 955 Solar) it seems that, despite the Breathing Variations being present in beta changelogs and in press materials on the update, they actually weren’t rolled out to 955.
Thanks for acknowledging my Escape Collective story documenting Matthew Lefthand’s record-breaking 24-hour virtual ride. He is an amazing athlete who’s primed and ready to rewrite the ultra-cycling record books.
Hey Ray, do you have any plans to drill down into Gamin’s May 7, 2025 sunsetting of cycling maps on their Edge devices? My first reaction is that this is another Garmin shift to subscription revenue. As typical with Garmin, the details are confusing and the impacts probably won’t be clear for a while. They have something similar going on with watch mapping as well.
Their previous service approach really made travel navigation easy. Now it may mean going back to openstreetmap and similar. This is a PITA and probably kills off a lot of the newer Edge mapping associated options, such as POI, visible segments, etc.
While I think their communications are confusing AF (kinda the norm), on this particular item, best I can tell, this is a non-issue. Or at least a non-issue for anyone with the last two generations of Edge devices.
Essentially, the “Garmin Cycle Map” was a specific branded product name, that for a long-long time, you had to buy (or download the free OSM maps). Then, starting with the Edge 530/830/1030 series in 2019, Garmin started including those maps free of charge.
Following that in the Edge x40 series, the maps are still free, but now transitioned to Garmin’s “TopoActive” series, that includes basically more data in them (namely, topographic details). Still, naming and extra bits side, it was still free to Edge users. These maps were also made available to the x30 series.
Roughly speaking, this same transitioned happened on the wearables, though I’d have to dig back further to see exactly when they transitioend to the TopoActive maps. I feel like that was a long-long time ago.
At the end of the day, nobody has lost maps. They’re all still there, free as they were before. Just now fully consolidated under TopoActive that you’d have likely been using anyways for many years.
TLDR: This is just crappily worded statement from Garmin, introducing confusion, and then a bit of internet clickbait out there made it worse.