Lifetime Maps No Longer 4 Times A Year?

12 months or 12000 miles witch one come first.

You have to fault Navteq for missing roads, etc. Garmin merely takes what Navteq gives them and produces the product they need.

How is lifetime is 4 year life?

crap... well I guess I can't complain... got the LTU for only $40 years back... I definitely got my money's worth.

I could live with 2 or 3 QUALITY updates in a year. You know, the ones that actually show new roads built in the last 6 months? Yep, that kind.

It gets a tad tedious to update stuff like poi's and JCV's when roads are the main attraction, and why we use a GPS in the first place.

Like

In practice I only update my units once a year, but having more updates available is a good opportunity for missing roads to get into the map (which is always later than sooner)

In practice I only update my units once a year, but having more updates available is a good opportunity for missing roads to get into the map (which is always later than sooner)

Wow thats the first and last time I am going to post from the old Android webkit browser. Sorry for the dup!

It still has to be better then what GM offers at $199./yr

"...you will receive map data updates when and as such updates are made available..." COULD mean more OR less than 4/yr. If "the supplier" decides to do less then u get less. If the supplier decides to do more (doubtful) then u get more. It takes the pressure off Garmin to bug the supplier.

What is the criterion to release an update? That is the real question.

Then again, what does UP TO 4 times a year mean anyway. It limits the upside. It means u might get 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 updates in a year. So the only thing the new stmt says is u might get MORE than 4 a year.

All I know is that if Garmin would be cutting their legs off at the knees if they slowed the updates more at this time. With competition from other companies, they really should be figuring out a way to update the maps more often, not the other way around. A GPS is only as good as it's map data.

I know 3 individuals who have NEVER updated their GPS with LTM feature and never will.

I have not updated the last two updates but will the next one. The folks on this site are involved with their GPS but it is a very very small % of Garmin owners.

I suspect less than 20% of GPS owners with LTM update every 3 months.

I'd guess if someone buys a GPS for the 'cool kid' factor, and doesn't travel, you could get away without updating the maps.

Many here actually put their GPS to work quite often, though. I know I do, and not updating is not an option for me.

Maybe but you'd never know that by how much drain it puts on the Garmin servers everytime an update is made available.

Garmin has a policy that they will cancel your lifetime map if you don't use it often enough to suit them. So I doubt if they are concerned about drain on their servers. And it should be apparent that if updates are available less frequently, that will only increase the number of people trying to download when the updates are finally available.

Once a year is plenty for me.

I would have to agree......We use are GPS for RV travel and I do not think I have found an update yet that caused any significant difference in our travels....again, I am a "casual" user so it might not have the same significance for me as it does for others that are on the road more.

Agreed on the frequency.
Your comments also reminded me to disable the damn JCV file on my unit. Hadn't done it after the last map update.

...what sort of riles me is that you can't transfer your lifetime subscription to a new device. If you old unit is simply broken, stolen, lost or you just want a newer bigger display or ... whatever, you have to pay all over. That seems like a bad policy to me.

So what about 2014.11 through 2014.19? Did those really exist or are .10 and .20 just release #1 and #2 for the year?

I don't recall getting any notice of updates for either of these, though my email prefs for that are checked.

For me, I travel about 1K a week to places I've never been before, throughout the US and Canada. I rarely go to the same place twice, and haven't seen an update that really mattered. I once put on 10K in a month with an old map set, and only saw one minor error that didn't matter.

Over the past year, I rarely see errors. Not saying that they don't exist, however they are very few and far between. While I do update every time a map comes out (hey, you never know what might be missing), I see no real need to have 4 a year in reality. I don't believe they are that significant.

I was curious to see how the updates increased in size, therefore providing more information of road changes, POI's and other features.

I backed up my 2460LMT right out of the box, the gmapromm.img was 1.437.568KB. I believe that map was 2011.40. My first update was 2012.10, I did a total of 8 backups (skipped 2012.20) and now have 2014.10.
The file size for 2014.10 shows 1,957.248KB for the North America & Mexico map set.

This totals almost 520MB (increase of almost 36.2%).
This is a significant increase for 9 quarterly map updates.
I don't know what portion of the increase is attributed to new roads, POI's, speed limits, etc.
This increase does not include JCV files, voice files and other files linked to a particular model.

I believe the largest amount of memory Garmin still provides on higher end units is 8GB, they will soon need to increase that if map updates continue to increase at this pace

Sounds like they are re-stating there policy, and for the newer users it appears as something new.

It seems to me that 2 updates per year would be reasonable. It could happen every half a year or 6 months. But the current cost of "Garmin nüMaps Lifetime North America Map Updates" at 64.99 should be at around 25.00, if Garmin were to do that.

Really appreciate that information, who would know how much time is spent in updating the maps.. Puts a different light on things

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Like Wise-

We had an update about 1 month ago and now I have had another already. So if updates are coming once a month I'll be happy.

In truth they missed a new motorway in Christchurch and maybe there was more people than just me who complained.

But that said the updates were only a month apart.

Sounds like "when available"