Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but I have zero faith that any device whose primary distinguishing feature is a subscription connectivity service will be usable in more than five years.

What does Garmin gain by killing off an older device if the owner still pays for a subscription?

Also, it's not like this is a hypothetical question, they've been around for decades. They do have a track record you can refer to, instead of just blind faith.

Selling you a new $1200 device.

See: Garmin nüvi.

It's not as though my cell phone will continue working forever. Nest discontinued Nest Aware. I've gotten bitten by this exact phenomenon more times than I care to admit.

I don't care about Garmin's reputation, it's simply a fact that having satellites talking to specialized devices requires a critical mass of subscriptions. There's a chain of vendors that need to all be on board to support all the hardware that keeps those devices online and updated, and at some point they will be discontinued. Probably sooner rather than later, especially when plenty of new phones make the functionality here redundant.

> See: Garmin nüvi.

You'll have to elaborate, that's a wide product line. And they still sell map updates for many Nuvi devices: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/1456/pn/010-D0743-00/#devices

The oldest still supported Garmin inReach device is the original DeLorme inReach from 2011 (Garmin bought DeLorme).

That at least bodes well for long term support.

I suspect that subscription supported devices will actually get better support than standard Garmin products.

i'm an owner of their Garmin 945 LTE released over 4 years ago. I have paid the subscription since. The device is still working very well, still got an update a couple of months ago. Battery still lasts about 5 days.

At least LTE doesn't require involvement on Garmin's part to keep it working.