You're paying something of a subscription anyway to use your GPS navigation system already - if you want the maps to be up to date, you'll have to spend money yearly to keep it that way, plus the couple of hours or so to update the device. I'm OK paying a GPS subscription once a year that's the same price as the annual map update so long as this includes traffic service and over the air map updates. That's pretty much Dash's model, seems to be where AT&T is heading too. At some point, phones and GPS nav systems will be merged; we're on that path now.
Consumer electronics companies are figuring out that the key to longevity at this stage in our economic development is the sale of subscription-based services, not commodities. This trend isn't going away, but maybe it's not such a bad thing either.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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You're paying something of a subscription anyway to use your GPS navigation system already - if you want the maps to be up to date, you'll have to spend money yearly to keep it that way, plus the couple of hours or so to update the device. I'm OK paying a GPS subscription once a year that's the same price as the annual map update so long as this includes traffic service and over the air map updates. That's pretty much Dash's model, seems to be where AT&T is heading too. At some point, phones and GPS nav systems will be merged; we're on that path now.
Consumer electronics companies are figuring out that the key to longevity at this stage in our economic development is the sale of subscription-based services, not commodities. This trend isn't going away, but maybe it's not such a bad thing either.