The Garmin Fenix 7 Solar (ASIN B09NVNQKPN) is available on Amazon.ca for $999 CAD — Garmin's flagship multisport GPS watch with Power Glass solar charging for up to 22 days of battery life, dual-frequency multi-band GPS, and full TopoActive topographic maps for backcountry navigation without cell service.
9 mentions · 2 threadslast mention Feb 2025
Real comments from Reddit, linked to the original thread. Nothing paraphrased.
They will likely start doing this with the newer lines and expect people to treat it like how they expect rich people to just buy a new phone annually. I got into Garmin because of the old reviews saying how old their stuff is and still works and gets updates years later. Future buyers should buy based on the current features and not future potential anymore as it looks like Garmin is going the route of maximizing big shareholder profits instead of the community it once catered to.
Garmin is also running out of ideas. The Fenix 5,6,7 had genuine jumps forward in GPS, heart rate measurement accuracy, battery life, and additional features which were actually helpful to some or most people. Now we're at the stage where the tech is excellent, but "workout execution score improvements" and "keyboard enhancements" are key features on the road map.
Buy the watch for the features it has when you buy it. Not for the features it might get in the future.
This is not garmin going a new route, this was always garmin route. They just had more space between launches in the past, but their history of abandoning models early is old, like the 645 music was abandoned 7 years ago at release almost.
Facts clearly show, that cheaper Garmin watches get new features that Fenix 7 and Epix (both pro and non pro versions) do not get. On questions raised about it on Garmin official forums, no one from Garmin responds, they just ignore those topics... Polar, Suunto, Coros, and Amazfit brought very big features in new updates to their previous lines of watches, which Garmin does not do.
I'm still impressed by the software support for this little guy. I'm proud to own it!
Same here but I don't even know if we've received new features. I just keep on logging runs exactly as it did on day one.
The fact that none of these updates change anything important, yet we still cannot have them, is what amazes me. I mean, a meditation activity? A passcode? Are those supposed to be reasons to make me upgrade? Come on, Garmin, it's ridiculous... Do you want to be upgraded? Pay another $800! Infuriating. Who came up with this strategy, and what are they trying to accomplish with it?
Unless the f8 samples blood lactate with a subdermal needle and generates a force field, I'm sticking with the 7. Really though, I don't imagine upgrading til my f7's wheels fall off, hopefully five more years, but it's still neat to see what they roll out in the interim.
Fenix 7 Solar owners aren't complaining about the hardware itself — durability and multi-sport tracking still earn praise, and several say they're “proud” to own a watch pushing years of software support. The dominant complaint (4 of 9 mentions) is about Garmin's update policy: owners say Garmin has stopped shipping meaningful new features to the Fenix 7 line while pushing them to cheaper, newer watches, and that the company doesn't respond to community questions about it on its own forums. Several owners frame this as a broader trend of prioritizing upgrade-cycle revenue over the multi-year software support Garmin built its reputation on. The advice from current owners is consistent: buy it for the features it has today, not promises about tomorrow. Good buy if you want proven multisport/solar hardware and don't expect future feature updates; skip it if ongoing software development is part of your buying decision.
