I might be paranoid but I don't know. I think I used to look up sailing locations in france and spain before and I didn't ever buy charts for there. Think as long as you were connected, oyu were able to see routes and stuff. You only paid for the offline use (like at a passage). I can't even zoom in without the route planner. It's still gray area.
Yes this definitely used to be the case, even without subscription you could see the charts online just not download them. Seems to be a money grab from Garmin, or possibly they're trying to push people to ActiveCaptain which will replace Navionics app eventually as it did with the online portal.
Navionics works flawlessly with my B&G over wifi, I didn't even set anything up it just shows up. I'm not sure what my plan is, right now nothing seems as good as Navionics but I don't want to reward Garmin for what they've done to it
I'm in the same situation. I'm annoyed at Garmin, but I haven't been able to find anything that works as well as the Navionics iPad / phone app. I trialled CMAP on my latest trip, but found it much less intuitive - though the charts themselves are well presented and clear, the route planning was difficult.
So I wasn't just paranoid.
Rampant, uncontrolled capitalism. Just because communism is bad, don't assume capitalism is good. It's just less bad for a time. If the ponzi scheme is ever interrupted pensions and markets will collapse and society will go with it. Unfortunately we're running out of people to exploit to keep up the illusion.
It's the Garmin attitude that makes me reluctant to renew my Navionics plotter charts. I don't trust them to not do a Musk and disable them in a fit of pique, if I somehow offend the latest subscription model! Certainly the connectivity between iPad app and instruments has been degraded since the app subscription has expired.
I don't even think that has anything to do with capitalism, because capitalism means you'd get more money out of it. This is just a bad business strategy because it will drive people away from the product and look for better alternatives, and if there aren't any, then there soon will be.
That’s level one capitalism. We’ve moved on from there many years back. Now a company makes money, goes public, gets sucked dry by investors and dies, then chump home investors lose all their money while the pros buy out a startup that replaces it.
I didn't know that word, but yeah. It's accurate. It happens everywhere. Navionics is one example apparently. I wish I knew how they calculated the tracks and where they get the charts from, then I'd build my own alternative to navionics lol
I suspect a large part of it is licensing chart data from regional ENC coordinating centres (RENCs), possibly modifying it here and there to incorporate additional data, and selling it onwards to the consumer. Example: Distribution — IC-ENC