Garmin Death: Good / Bad News

I got a Fenix 6s Pro for Christmas 2021 and first wore it for a week of "daily wear" early in 2022. And then I started wearing it 24/7 around Thanksgiving 2022.

The battery just started to TANK early this summer. I went from charging it about once/week to needing to charge it DAILY. (And that downfall happened QUICKLY, not gradually.) I could charge it to 100% some evening, and wake up (obviously not having done any workouts during that time) with it at 50-60% the next morning.

I contacted Garmin support to ask about it on Tuesday (via a "chat," so I got quick responses while testing possible issues). He had me check that the pulse ox wasn't on and draining the battery. I did a factory reset. The reset didn't allow the Garmin to be recognized by my phone again. I did all the troubleshooting that my Garmin app said to try (quit the app, restart the phone, check that bluetooth is on, etc) and that didn't work. I uninstalled and reinstalled the app. Finally, he had me try an "unprompted master reset" as well as then many of the same troubleshooting things and that didn't work either. Every time, it just got stuck looking for my phone or my phone looking for it:

Saw a lot of this.


And this on my phone...


... which ended like this a dozen times.

"Aaron" on the other end of the Garmin chat said "I'm not sure what's going on, but with that and your battery trouble, we can replace that." He said they were out of the Fenix 6s at the moment, so he said he'd upgrade me to the Fenix 7S Solar! That's like a $600-700 Garmin! That was less than 48 hours ago, and it should be here shortly!!

(Because I didn't want to wait up to 2 weeks for a working Garmin, he "charged" me $170 to basically promise I'll ship my busted-ass Garmin to them when the new one comes, and then I'll get the $170 back. I already have a shipping label, but I want to make sure the 7S comes before shipping my old one away. This looks like it will cost me $0 - just have to get to a UPS Store.)

The old one is totally reset, and it won't connect to my phone. So I can't "save" any of my data since about 11:15 a.m. yesterday. And I can't change the face or any other settings that would normally be set on my phone and transferred over. So my run yesterday morning was my "farthest" and "fastest" run ever, according to my Garmin that thinks it's just 1 day old:

The only (slight) bummer in this was saying goodbye to my official "10,000+ steps/day" streak that started on April 3, 2023. Yes, I'm officially still getting in my steps, but there's no "proof" of that being transferred to any device.

Goodbye 477 day streak!

(I also have 2 other streaks going that aren't such big deals: "30+ mins of workouts each day" and "1 mile walked each day" both since about Thanksgiving of 2023. Those are both 30 day "badges" that reset and get earned every month, so it hurts less...)

I HOPE to have another positive update shortly about my new updated Garmin!!