fēnix 5

Fénix 5 was a good watch, fenix 7 was not, Epix Pro was a failure out the gate hence the horrible sales on the particular model.

Garmin garmin. I got a Fenix 5pro second hand for £100 best thing ive ever bought for running

Was GARMIN for many years, starting with Forerunner 910XT and progressing to Fenix 5Pro Saphire. Did last Tri event in 2019 and ended up switching to AWU when it first was released. I have no regrets, if I ever go back to Tri will probably use another GARMIN for racing/training but keep AWU as daily driver.

I went the other way from a fenix 5 sapphire to a ultra2. The fenix was great, battery life particularly, but it was missing the features like body battery and some of the metrics the newer fenix’s got. It might be an assumption on my part, but I can’t imagine the newer watches got extra sensors or anything that would have made it difficult to update the older watches with some of those features. I appreciate that they want to sell the new models, but the updates never seemed to offer anything in my experience. The Garmin app at best was clunky, so most of the time I’d only open it to force an activity to sync then look at strava. I do however miss the recovery hours. I like that with the ultra it just works all the time, it charges really quickly so while I have to charge it more than the Garmin it’s not an issue. The updates seem to have tangible improvements, there’s plenty of 3rd party apps to get the training data and present it in a useful way for you. Plus all the metrics it gathers can be viewed, whereas a lot of the Garmin data was nicely presented in the charts but the data wasn’t as visible. It may have improved since I last used it. Certainly it wasn’t as available to sync to other apps, although probably most of the apps you are likely to want to use. Also not sure how they got to the run predictor figures, I mountain bike, and it gave me relatively fast predictions for running. All in I was happy with both watches, the ultra is a better daily watch, the Garmin excelled in battery life, and perhaps for serious training. But with all the data and apps for the ultra, I don’t think you’d be missing much on the Apple Watch platform. And I think fenixs are now more expensive than the ultras.

I was a Suunto guy for years, but after my last one got smashed I switched to Garmin, mostly because the Fenix 5 pairs with my Inreach and everything syncs up.