Every time Garmin launches a flagship, someone asks the same question: is this the year MIP finally dies?
Not yet. And according to Garmin's co-COO, not until OLED can match it where it counts.
Brad Trenkle sat down with TechRadar's Andrew Williams for an interview published November 4, and the display question got the most interesting answer of the whole conversation. His position is simple. MIP stays as long as it delivers something OLED can't.
The quote that matters
Trenkle didn't hedge on why MIP still exists.
"There are definitely different things that are enabled for our customers if we stay with a transflective color MIP display. The most significant right now is battery life."
He used the Enduro line as his example, which tells you where Garmin thinks this technology belongs. An Enduro is built for people who go days without a charger, and that's a spec sheet an emissive display has a hard time matching.
Then he addressed the part everyone actually wants to know: is the gap closing?
"We do see that gap closing. It's closed a lot, which is why you've seen battery life on our OLED products continue to increase generation over generation. But that gap has not completely converged, and I think until it does, we definitely don't think that MIP will completely go away."
Read that carefully. This isn't a promise that MIP survives forever. It's a conditional: when OLED catches up, MIP stops being necessary. Garmin has now put a mechanism on the record, even if it won't put a date on it.
Mezha picked up the interview the same day, and its summary lands on the same two points: MIP stays while it has a battery advantage, and some solar technology could work with OLED without hurting image quality. That second part is the buried headline.
The gap, in Garmin's own numbers
Garmin publishes per-mode battery figures in the fenix 9 series owner's manual, and the 47mm comparison is stark.
- fenix 9 Pro (AMOLED): up to 18 days in smartwatch mode, up to 32 hours in activity mode
- fenix 9 Pro Solar (MIP): up to 21 days in smartwatch mode, up to 34 days with solar, and up to 54 hours in activity mode, or 81 hours with solar
So on a 47mm case, the MIP watch runs about 69% longer in GPS mode with no sun at all, and around 2.5 times longer if you're outdoors enough to charge. We went through the physical tradeoffs of these two watches when they launched, including the 14.5% thickness penalty the Solar carries at 47mm.
The 51mm numbers are more interesting than they look, because they cut both ways.
- fenix 9 Pro 51mm (AMOLED): up to 31 days smartwatch, up to 56 hours activity
- fenix 9 Pro Solar 51mm (MIP): up to 30 days smartwatch, up to 57 days with solar, and up to 75 hours activity, or 124 hours with solar
Without sunlight, the 51mm Solar is actually one day worse than the AMOLED in smartwatch mode. It only wins big once the panel is getting light. That's a genuinely useful detail if you're choosing between them, and it shows why Trenkle frames MIP as conditional rather than sacred.
Where MIP actually lives now
The lineup has quietly sorted itself into two camps.
MIP plus solar: fenix 9 Pro Solar, Instinct 3 Solar, Enduro 3, and the recently launched Enduro 4. These are the watches built around multi-day and expedition use, and the Enduro 4 is the clearest example of the formula.
AMOLED: everything else, including the whole recent Forerunner range. The Forerunner 70 is the one that ended the debate at the entry level, moving from a monochrome MIP panel to a 1.2-inch AMOLED when it launched in May.
That split tells you what Garmin thinks MIP is for. It isn't the default anymore. It's a specialist tool that happens to be paired with solar charging, because those two technologies have been locked together for years.
Why solar has never come to OLED
This is the part of the interview worth reading twice.
Garmin has used two kinds of solar technology. The older one, amorphous silicon, sits over the top of the display itself. Trenkle described it as being "almost like polarized sunglasses," with fine etched lines across the panel. You get solar charging, but the layer is sitting on top of the pixels.
"You're cutting etching very fine lines into amorphous silicon, and so that sits over the top of the organic material, which can obviously degrade."
That's the structural reason solar has been an MIP feature. An MIP panel is reflective and doesn't care much about a slightly milky layer in front of it. An OLED panel that's emitting light absolutely does.
The newer approach is crystalline silicon, which Garmin uses in more recent products. It isn't transparent, so it doesn't go over the screen. Instead, Garmin makes the chapter ring solar, using the area around the display.
"You get the ring around the outside, but nothing overlays the active area of the display."
Williams asked the obvious follow-up: could that bring solar to an OLED watch without hurting image quality?
"It's always finding the right technology to apply in the circumstance that we want, but in that case, you don't get any degradation or loss, whether it's reflectivity or [image quality]. Yes, it would be a way to counter that."
That is not a product announcement. Garmin has not said it is building a solar AMOLED watch, and Trenkle was answering a hypothetical. But it is the first time someone at the company has described a technical path to solar on OLED and called it viable.
What this means if you're buying
Three practical takeaways.
If battery life is your priority, nothing changed this week. The fenix 9 Pro Solar and the Enduro line still own the long-runtime end of the lineup, and Trenkle just explained why Garmin isn't walking away from them.
If you're waiting for a solar AMOLED, don't wait. The technology is plausible. The roadmap is not public. There's no model number, no filing, and no date, and we've seen how long Garmin sits on panel decisions.
The resale argument is still intact. Some Garmin owners are vocal about MIP for reasons that have nothing to do with specs. A Reddit poll TechRadar covered in April, with around 1,100 self-selected votes, found 34% of respondents said they'd switch to a different MIP smartwatch if Garmin dropped the technology, and 51% said they wanted to stay on MIP in some form. That poll is skewed by its own framing (it asked MIP fans specifically), so treat it as a signal about a passionate minority, not a market survey.
Still, it's a minority Garmin has clearly noticed. The company keeps shipping MIP watches with solar, and now its co-COO has explained the exact condition under which that stops.
Bottom line
Garmin has told us what would kill MIP: OLED closing the battery gap. It has also told us the gap is closing and hasn't closed.
Meanwhile the more interesting question isn't whether MIP survives. It's whether Garmin can put solar charging on an OLED panel using a crystalline silicon ring, because that would dissolve the reason the two display types are still fighting at all. Trenkle says it's possible. He did not say it's happening.
If you want the long-battery watch today, the fenix 9 Pro Solar is the one the interview is really about. If you want the bright screen and don't care about a week of standby, the standard fenix 9 Pro is the cheaper, thinner pick. Either way, this is a decision Garmin has now publicly tied to a battery number rather than a preference.
Sources: TechRadar's interview with Garmin co-COO Brad Trenkle, published November 4, 2026 by Andrew Williams, which carries all the direct quotes on MIP, OLED battery life and Garmin's two solar technologies; Garmin's fenix 9 series owner's manual battery information section, which supplies the per-mode runtime figures for the fenix 9 Pro and fenix 9 Pro Solar at 47mm and 51mm; Garmin's corporate press release from June 24, 2024 confirming Trenkle's title as co-Chief Operating Officer; Mezha's November 4 write-up of the same interview, which independently summarises the MIP and solar-OLED points; DC Rainmaker's May 2026 Forerunner 70 coverage confirming the entry-level move from MIP to AMOLED; TechRadar's April 2026 report on the Reddit MIP poll for the community sentiment figures, which are self-selected and should be read as indicative only.
