In my view, Garmin programmers are simply getting lazy and sloppy. With IPad and Android memory size and processing speed increasing they have no incentive to be efficient. What I hate the most is the addition of all of these worthless features that maybe 1% of their user’s utilize. I really wonder how they decide what feature to add - anyone know? And is Foreflight as bad? I tried Foreflight a few years ago and didn’t like it but maybe it’s time for a change. The Garmin bloatware doesn’t seem to be ending and like others, I don’t want to be forced into upgrading an IPad every two years just to run the app.
It isn’t just Garmin, it’s industry wide.
And both ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot will run great on this year’s hardware until next year’s updates.
It’s just the way it is in the rental software business anymore. I’m surprised we haven’t seen hardware leases make a comeback in expensive mobile devices, but the reason they aren’t doing that is the residual value of the device would be near zero at the end of any normal term lease.
One year of superb performance, maybe three years of mediocre performance, and then you replace the hardware. Perhaps faster than that if you’re sensitive to page flip times and soft buttons feeling as responsive as hardware buttons on real devices, and such.
I can guarantee you that no exec in charge of either place who uses the software is running it on anything older than three years, and probably not older than one. It’s a tax write off for them, they’ve got no incentive to hang with the peasants who only buy these things every four or five years.
Someone recently asked me offline which iPad model to buy for this EFB stuff. I said the answer is whichever one has the fastest processor and most RAM (not storage... RAM...), if you want to keep it four or five years MAX. Forget about screen size or anything else if you’re going for longevity.
Whatever the latest fastest processor and RAM is, just buy that will enough storage to hold the entire map set twice, for the few days of overlap from release until the FAA data goes active.
It’s rental software. It will do nothing BUT bloat.
We used to time keypress-to-displayed times long long as part of QA, on the oldest hardware our support contract allowed. And we could be up a release if it broke a magic number, and sent it back to engineering for a fix. All we had to do is say it didn’t meet the responsiveness spec at the next change control board meeting and the entire software product would be red flagged for “no release allowed” status.
You won’t see that in modern software “engineering”. You just toss updates out until you have too many complaints on the older hardware and remove that hardware from the approved list.
