Sunday Runday
In this weekly column, Android Central Wearables Editor Michael Hicks talks about the world of wearables, apps, and fitness tech related to running and health, in his quest to get faster and more fit.
The Garmin Forerunner 570 and 970 are more expensive than their predecessors. Other 2025 Garmin watches skimped on new features to keep prices low, so I’m happy Garmin didn’t hold back on its Forerunners. But it’s also become clearer that Garmin doesn’t feel a need to compete with other brands’ features — only against itself.
The jump between the $599 Forerunner 965 and $749 Forerunner 970 is significant. You get the newest Elevate v5 generation for better HR accuracy, ECGs and skin temperature readings, flashlight, mic & speaker for calling and commands, sapphire crystal protection, and new metrics like running tolerance.
Or if you’re weighing the $549 Forerunner 270 against the $449 Forerunner 265, you also get the gen5 HR accuracy boost, doubled screen brightness on a larger display, the same mic & speaker, and skin temperature with heat acclimation.
The Instinct 3 and Vivoactive 6 stuck to last-gen HR sensors, treading water on hardware so that Garmin could keep them in their fixed price ranges. I feared Garmin would do the same with its Forerunners, making us wait until 2027 for real changes.
That’s why I’m excited for the Forerunner 970, but also feeling frustrated at how Garmin holds back mid-tier watches like the Forerunner 570.
As prices rise, held-back features are harder to accept
The $499 Instinct 3 didn’t have offline maps despite being an “adventure” watch, while cheaper rival watches like the $349 COROS PACE Pro and Suunto Race S did. I complained at the time, but Garmin hadn’t given it storage space for maps, prioritizing a lightweight CPU for battery life.
The $549 Forerunner 570 does have storage space for maps, and no need to hold back the processor. There’s no logistical reason it shouldn’t support maps; even if they’re not pre-downloaded like on the 970, Garmin could let you download a specific region’s topo data, at least.
The only real explanation is that their absence makes people more likely to pay for the 970.
The same applies to the 570 health sensors. I obviously appreciate the enhanced HR accuracy and skin temperature. But every other gen5 watch has ECGs, including the $449 Venu 3. And outside of Garmin, ECGs are the norm, from mainstream watches to fitness rivals like the COROS APEX and Polar Vantage series.
But Garmin ignores the context of its rivals; the only competitor that matters is the Forerunner 970. That needs to stand out, so the 570 misses out. Heart health warnings become a $750 bargaining chip.
It’s a common-enough strategy for Garmin. With the excellent Forerunner 165, you can’t see your training load even though it clearly calculates load in the background to determine your VO2 Max, recovery time, and daily suggested workouts with anaerobic or low aerobic focuses. Blocking that data upsells you to the Forerunner 265.
I accepted that artificial feature block because the 165 costs $249, and training load is still fairly niche. But Garmin watch prices keep creeping up. It’s harder to swallow blocked features when these mid-tier models cost much more than a Galaxy or Apple Watch.
With Garmin watches, every component has a price tag
Smartwatch “tiers” are common enough these days, and every company wants to upsell you. But they’re also selective about which features are price-locked because they know it’ll look bad if a competitor offers something for much less.
You obviously pay more for steel or titanium casing, or other hardware boosts like better battery life. But otherwise, they squeeze most features into the mainline model while sticking to the same pricing every year (aside from the occasional inflationary boost).
With Garmin, every new feature to modernize its watches comes with a price bump. MIP-to-AMOLED display swaps for the Forerunner and Instinct lineups cost tacked on another $50–100 to the usual price. On the Fenix 8, collectively adding AMOLED, better sensors, and a mic & speaker added $200 to the price.
You won’t find dual-band GPS on any watch $300 or less, nor offline maps on any sub-$600 watch. And even though Garmin’s Gen5 HR sensors came out in 2023, it will keep using the Gen4 sensors on “cheaper” models like the $500 Instinct 3 today.
I don’t know how much the components cost Garmin, but it wants us to know that it’ll pass that cost onto us.
Other factors like tariff concerns bump up pricing, too. But Garmin’s 2025 strategy establishes a clear Garmin precedent: Once a watch costs a certain price, you shouldn’t expect new hardware at that price, nor features already established at the flagship tier.
The next version will either cost the same but make minimal upgrades, or add new tools and cost much more.
Garmin treats any new feature as an opportunity to ask athletes for more money in exchange for more value. And it can do this because it doesn’t feel as much pressure to price its fitness watches competitively as other brands.
Garmin users like its ecosystem too much — or are too invested in it — to leave. And so Garmin accepts the negative press around Connect+ paywalled features and price-locks the coolest new features because its loyal customers will pay $750 or more for them, even if they grumble about it.
If you think the Forerunner 970 and 570 are too expensive, then at least you know the last-gen Garmin watches are still available — and discounted for Memorial Day, so a Forerunner 965 costs $50 less than the 570.
Otherwise, we have to accept this new normal with new Garmin watches.
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