Garmin Smart Watch Users Pissed As Company Opens The Door To Paywall Enshittification
from the enshittify-ALL-the-things! dept
In recent years the Garmin line of smartwatches had an advantage over an increasingly crowded smart watch field. Unlike Google/FitBit, they were avoiding hiding a lot of features behind annoying subscription paywalls.
Looking to goose quarterly earnings and give investors that impossible, sweet, perpetual growth they crave, Fitbit has been increasingly putting more and more basic functions behind its subscription paywall. Most of the stuff isn’t interesting enough to warrant any sort of extra payment, and, like most subscriptions, the company can’t help but slowly, steadily raise prices.
Garmin had been leeching annoyed customers from Fitbit by avoiding this tactic; until now. Garmin recently introduced a new premium Garmin+ tier it says will provide “AI-powered insights,” a Performance Dashboard that tracks your workout histories and improvements to Garmin’s LiveTrack service (which does exactly what it sounds like).
The subscription service costs users an additional $7 a month. Garmin is quick to claim that customers’ “free experience is not going away,” but that usually winds up being an empty promise once companies are on the treadmill of goosing quarterly earnings with often-pointless paywalling of features.
To be clear a lot of Garmin’s watch lineup is significantly more expensive than most smart watches. Some variants of the Fenix 8, for example, can cost upwards of $1200. So not too surprisingly a lot of Garmin customers are pissed off by Garmin’s opening the door to enshittification and even higher consumer costs. At a time when they’re already facing a lot of higher costs due to kakistocracy.
“To everyone who cares about the future of Garmin customer service: DO NOT SIGN UP,” one Reddit user recently complained. “We need to take a firm stand to stop this totally detrimental trend of subscriptions everywhere. We are already paying hundreds for watches that only last a few years because batteries are not replaceable.”
“Never paying for the subscription,” one commenter said, “but it is going to make me rethink my future watch purchases,” lamented another. “I could justify the Garmin expense when I knew I was getting all the features with the watch, but we all know what happens to a service once a paid tier is introduced.”
They’re right to be annoyed. It’s extremely rare that once such subscription paywalls are introduced, the company introducing them doesn’t inevitably push their luck in a clumsy bid to goose earnings. Things generally just devolve until the company has pissed off so many customers it begins to feel a major dent in market share; deflating the point of the whole revenue-goosing effort in the first place.
A closer look at the AI features Garmin is now charging extra for reveals software that doesn’t appear to be doing all that much:
“My first few insights were pretty basic—just comparing my intensity minutes to a goal that I didn’t realize I had—but I figured more interesting analysis was yet to come. After a week, though, I haven’t seen it. The most exciting moment was when I caught the AI in a flagrant math error.”
This behavior ultimately opens the doors to other, younger, hungrier competitors that respect their consumers (or at least pretend to). But with pointless Trump tariffs imposing huge new taxes on everything you buy, that innovation evolution cycle could be stuck in slow motion for the foreseeable future as everyone pays more for everything, for no coherent reason.
Filed Under: consumers, enshittification, fees, fitness, market share, paywalls, smart watch, subscriptions
Companies: garmin
Comments on “Garmin Smart Watch Users Pissed As Company Opens The Door To Paywall Enshittification”
And another reason to vote with your wallet!
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Which gets tricky to do after you’ve purchased a $1200 smartwatch.
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…but really easy to do if you’re looking for a smart watch and see the price tag.
(Those who do already own one could sell it to someone willing to deal with Garmin; even if that person ends up buying a subscription, Garmin won’t get the extra money of a watch sale.)
Et Tu, Garmin?
Beware the ides of march!
Et Tu, Garmin?
With apologies to those addicted to actual drugs
Companies are like drug addicts when it comes to new revenue streams. Sure they might tell you they’re ‘just trying something out’ but unless they get enough pushback immediately to make clear that the new idea is going to cost them enough customers to outweigh the gains the ‘optional’ new cost is not just staying it’s going to inevitably expand, because in capitalism the central rule is that the numbers must always go up in the short-term, no matter what the long-term costs may be.
And so paying $7 a month is really the more annoying thing?
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Subscription Treadmill
Garmin needs to tread lightly, or else they will end up like Peloton. A company valuation falling from $50 billion to $2.5 in 4 years can give investors a heart attack.
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Oh not only did you major in international politics, constitutional law, biology, law enforcement, and communications, you just graduated summa cum dumbass in economics.
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It’s entertaining, isn’t it? Like, he’s 100% wrong on 100% of his posts, and so easily disproven. Peleton’s subscriber base is what saved it.
For example, this is the first headline I get when googling and look at the news tab:
The “Do Some Math, Call It AI” bug keeps spreading. Well, I guess that streamlines the selection of exercise smart watches.
Mostly unrelated- the submit story function seems to be dead and gone but has anyone heard or seen something substantial about the claims that a gov department is predicating contracts for the future use of AWS data storage on the book or kindle side of Amazon removing a a selection of progressive books?
Battery life
The one feature Garmin has over most all other smartwatches is battery life. I’m a Pebble user, and no other smartwatch I’ve found offers similar battery life to a Pebble than Garmin (Venu 3). If I have to charge my watch every day, or every other day, it’s useless.
Except now; Pebble is back: https://repebble.com/
I almost pulled the trigger on a Garmin until a saw repebble. I got the Core Time Duo instead.
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That just says “long battery life” without quantifying it, which worries me a little because “smart watch” manufacturers have conditioned people to accept pathetic battery lives as normal. And, indeed, Wikipedia says the original Pebble’s battery lasts a week; not as pathetic as some, but the non-smart watch I’m wearing now advertises a 10-year life (and I did bill it to my employee health plan for “fitness tracking”, although the stopwatch is the extent of that).
I think it’d be great if some company such as Casio or Timex released a good, and widely available, programmable watch. Texas Instruments did release the ez430; but it was overly large and had an “inverted” display, poor water resistance, and only a 2-year battery life. Timex tends to be horrible in terms of user interface (like, 10 button presses to fix the time in both time zones if it’s running slowly), and my Casio watches are off by seconds every week. These things could be easily fixed by a firmware replacement.
(The “Sensor Watch” looks cool, too, but only has about a year of battery life and a poor water-resistance rating.)
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10 year battery life with an always on screen.
At this point, the one thing smartwatches and fitness trackers do that regular watches don’t is automatically adjust for DST. Plus the automatic time synchronization, which makes them more accurate than cheap watches.
Pity they are worse at being watches everywhere else.
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I don’t know about automatic DST, but many have a manual way to enable or disable DST, thereby saving 24 presses of the “hour” button per year. One can definitely get automatic time synchronization in a “regular” watch, though it might be a $150 watch instead of a $20 one (and who knows whether WWV will survive Trump’s presidency). Casio, for example, has some solar-powered radio-controlled watches.
But you’re under-selling the fitness trackers, in that you seem to have forgotten about their fitness tracking features. To be fair, I think the same is true for many of the owners; the idea that more data will make people more fit seems aspirational rather than realistic. Still, those devices do track heart rates and sleep patterns, and “regular” watches mostly don’t; it’s probably not even possible in a non-solar model with 10-year battery life.
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I didn’t forget about those fitness tracking features. I tried them for a bit, found that they didn’t alter my behaviour, and then tried to turn them off. Then I found annoyances like the step and calorie counters still demanding that I swipe them away every single day before it shows me the time. Or almost all the watch faces displaying those tracking details. Sometimes at the expense of useful things, like the battery status.
I don’t question that they can be useful for some people. Just not for me.
As for those radio watches, I live in New Zealand. I had questions about if the radio signal reached here and, as far as I could tell, a few brands reached Auckland. Not much further.
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Yeah, that sounds about right (per Casio’s page on range), and I’m not confident in those having a long-term future anyway. The rechargeable battery might last a decade or two, but will those signals be around? Watches with built-in time zone databases similarly concern me.
“Dumb” watches should really be switching to GPS, if technically feasible. Otherwise, the Timex Datalink could do computer-syncing in 1994 with 3-year battery life, so I’m sure they could come up with something viable today—like activating Bluetooth every day or so and scanning for a paired phone.
As for the uselessness of fitness tracking, that doesn’t change whether it’s “one thing smartwatches and fitness trackers do that regular watches don’t”. People buying things they don’t need is another problem entirely.
(A family member once showed me their sleep-tracking data to “prove” they’d slept poorly. But they were also yawning and had bags under their eyes, and had a cold, and remembered having woken up several times during the night. So, no shit.)
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For fitness tracking, I’m not denying that some people use it. I’m just saying that it makes the device less useful as a watch.
Built in timezone databases work well. Until a government changes something. When DST turns on and off here has changed once in my lifetime.
As for sleep tracking, I doubt that would work that well when I take the watch off at night.
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“Long battery life” is explained in the blog post. The new model is advertised as lasting 30 days between charges.
That’s unheard of in the smartwatch arena.
I don’t mind needing to recharge it periodically, I just don’t want to have to charge it more than once a week.
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Uh… not in the one that’s linked, nor in the “full” post linked from it.
Anyway, I suppose 30 days is respectable enough, although I wonder what Casio’s doing differently to get 10 years. Like, if one avoided using certain “smart” features on the Pebble, could the time be significantly extended?
Garmin... isn't as good as Fitbit for me.
I used one of the Garmins, I don’t remember which one but it was likely in the sub-$300 category. I have SVT – surpra-ventricular tachicardia. Every so often my heart decides to take a trip to 190+ BPM. My Garmin never saw it – or would display my pulse decending to 25bpm instead.
My Fitbit Versa 2 might take a minute or so to get with the program, but eventually it does reflect that my pulse has gone through the roof.
subscriptions - to use your products?
Subscriptions to use your products are a rip off. Especially when it is unforeseen or untold at the time of purchase.
It evolves to finding other products that are not a rip off, and it computes to a big waste to produce these to begin with. More landfill.