Monthly Archives: March 2025

ai, gadgets, hardware, running, tech

Garmin Connect+: new subscription will be a hard sell

Garmin, makers of sports watches which gather health and performance data on your activities, has announced Connect+, a subscription offering with “premium features and more personalised insights.”

Garmin Connect+

Garmin Connect is the cloud-based application that stores and manages user data, such as the route, pace and heart rate, on runs, cycle rides and other workouts, as well as providing a user interface which lets you browse and analyse this data. The mobile app is a slightly cut-down version of the web app. Until now, this service has been free to all customers of Garmin wearable devices.

The company stated that Garmin Connect+ is a “premium plan that provides new features and even more personalized insights … with Active Intelligence insights powered by AI.” It also promised customers that “all existing features and data in Garmin Connect will remain free.” The subscription costs $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year. UK price is £6.99 per month or £69.99 per year which is a bit more expensive.

The reaction from Garmin’s considerable community has been largely negative. The Garmin forum on Reddit which has over 266,000 members is full of complaints, not only because the subscription is considered poor value but also from fear that despite the company’s reassurance the free Garmin Connect service will get worse, perhaps becoming ad-laden or just less useful as all the investment in improvements is switched to the premium version.

On the official Garmin forums an initial thread filled quickly with complaints and was locked; and a new thread is going in the same direction. For example:

“I paid £800 for my Descent Mk2s with the understanding that there WAS NO SUBSCRIPTION and the high cost of my device subsidised the Connect platform. The mere existence of the paid platform is a clear sign that all/most new features will go to the paid version and the base platform will get nothing. You’ve broken all trust here Garmin, I was waiting for the next Descent to upgrade but I will look elsewhere now.”

A few observations:

  1. Companies love subscriptions because they give a near-guaranteed and continuous revenue stream.
  2. The subscription model combined with hardware can have a strange and generally negative impact on the customer, with the obvious example being printers where selling ink has proved more profitable than selling printers, to the point where some printers are designed with deliberately small-capacity cartridges and sold cheaply; the sale of the hardware can also be seen as the purchase of an income stream from ink sales.
  3. A Garmin wearable is a cloud-connected device and is inconvenient to use without the cloud service behind it. For example, I am a runner with a Garmin watch; when I add a training schedule I do so in the Connect web application, which then syncs with the watch so that while I am training the watch tells me how I am doing, too fast, too slow, heart rate higher than planned, and so on. That service costs money to provide so it may seem reasonable for Garmin to charge for it.
  4. The counter-argument is that customers have purchased Garmin devices, which are more expensive than similar hardware from other vendors, in part on the basis that they include a high quality cloud service for no additional cost. Such customers now feel let down.
  5. We need to think about how the subscription changes the incentives for the company. The business model until now has included the idea that more expensive watches light up different data-driven features. Sometimes these features depend on hardware sensors that only exist in the premium devices, but sometimes it is just that the device operating system is deliberately crippled on the cheaper models. Adding the subscription element to the mix gives Garmin an incentive to improve the premium cloud service to add features, rather than improving the hardware and on-device software.
  6. It follows from this that owners of the cheapest Garmin watches will get the least value from the subscription, because their hardware does not support as many features. Will the company now aim to sell watches with hitherto premium features more cheaply, to improve the value of the subscription? Or will it be more concerned to preserve the premium features of its more expensive devices to justify their higher price?
  7. It was predictable that breaking this news would be difficult: it is informing customers that a service that was previously completely free will now have a freemium model. The promise that existing free features would remain free has done little to reassure users, who assume either that this promise will not be kept, or that the free version will become gradually worse in comparison with the paid option. Could the company have handled this better? More engagement with users would perhaps help.

Finally, it seems to me that Connect+ will be a hard sell, for two reasons. First, Strava has already largely captured the social connection aspect of this type of service, and many Garmin users primarily use Strava as a result. Remarkably, even the free Strava is ad-free (other than for prompts to subscribe) and quite feature-rich. Few will want to subscribe both to Strava and Connect+, and Strava is likely to win this one.

Second, the AI aspect (which is expensive for the provider) has yet to prove its worth. From what I have seen, Strava’s Athlete Intelligence mostly provides banal feedback that offers no in-depth insight.

While one understands the reasons which are driving Garmin towards a subscription model, it has also given the company a tricky path to navigate.

audio, gadgets, hardware, hifi, tech

Changing my mind about open ear earphones

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I have become a fan of bone conduction earphones. Initially this was because they are great for running since they let you hear everything going on around you which is important for safety. I also came to realise that pushing earbuds into your ear to form a seal is not the best thing for comfort, even though it can deliver excellent sound quality. Bone conduction earphones sound OK but not great, but I found myself willing to sacrifice audio quality for these other characteristics.

That said, bone conduction earphones do have some problems. In particular, if you attempt to wind up the volume you get an unpleasant physical vibration, especially on tracks that have extended bass.

There is another option, which I have seen described as air conduction or open ear. In this design, the sound driver sits adjacent to your ear canal. I tried one of these a couple of years ago and found the audio unbearably tinny. Unfortunately I concluded that this was inherent to this type of earphone and dismissed them.

Recently I was able to review another pair of open ear earphones which has changed my mind. The actual product is a Baseus Bowie MF1 though I do not think it is extra special in itself; however it is pretty good and the sound is excellent, better I think than my usual bone conduction earphones and without any vibration issues.

I notice that market leader Shokz has cottoned onto this and the Openrun Pro 2 (at a much higher price than the Baseus) has dual driver, with the low bass handled by air conduction, again avoiding the vibration problem.

The more I think about it, the more I like the open ear or air conduction idea. No fuss about ear sleeve size or needing a perfect seal; no discomfort from jamming something tightly into your ear; and, I now realise, very acceptable sound quality.

book reviews, books, reviews, running

Out of Thin Air by Michael Crawley: a wonderful read

This is perhaps my favourite book on running, and I have read quite a few. The title is a play on words. The author lists two meanings, though I can find three.

Cover of Out of Thin Air by Michael Crawley

The first is that running has a mystique; “athletes who fly in, astound us with barely comprehensible feats of speed and endurance, and then vanish again into thin air,” Crawley writes.

The second and most important is that western media has tended to assume that “the performances of elite Ethiopian, Kenyan and Ugandan runners are produced almost directly ‘out of thin air’,” the reason being genetic traits or natural giftedness. This is patronising and wrong, and “masks the years of preparation and sacrifice that have gone into creating this illusion,” Crawley says, as well as the fact that the support of the Ethiopian state for running is “far superior” to that in the UK.

The third is that Ethiopians train at high altitude. The thin air has benefits, encouraging the body to adapt by creating more red blood cells, more blood vessels in the muscles, deeper breathing. Therefore running performance improves out of thin air.

It is timely that I write this Ethopia’s Tadese Takele has just won the men’s 2025 Tokyo marathon held on 2nd March, with a time of 2:03:23, and Ethiopia’s Sutume Asefa Kebede has won the women’s 2025 Tokyo marathon with a time of 2:16:31.

Crawley has two advantages over most others in writing this book. First, he is an outstanding runner. In 2018 he ran the Frankfurt Marathon in 2:20:53, putting him in the top 0.1% of runners, placing him 1084th best in the world for the marathon at the time, according to his world athletics ranking.

Second, he is an academic, an anthropologist who is an assistant professor at the University of Durham.

These two factors meant that when he went to Ethiopia between 2015 to 2016 to train with some of the country’s top runners, he both won the respect of the other athletes, and also brought with him unusual skills of observation.

The consequence is that as readers we become immersed in both the training and the life stories of the athletes. I have read other books about running in Africa but none has offered the same sense of being there as this one.

We learn about about what dedication to training means in this context; that the prize money for winning or placing high in major events is transformative and a big incentive for these runners; that training together with others is not just a matter of being in the same group but a deep connection of shared energy; that running on asphalt is the hardest kind of running and that natural surfaces are much preferred for training; that mixing different kinds of training, such as speed and terrain, even within a single session, is vital for progression; and that the transition from running well in training to performing in a foreign race is a difficult one that not everyone can manage.

There is much more and I felt a sense of loss when finishing the book. I look forward to reading it again.

Out of Thin Air is available from Amazon or from your favourite bookshop.