Montana 700 keeps turning off

Thank you for the laugh before bed.  Yes, it’s infuriating.  Seriously though, you have to laugh at the sheer stupidity, incompetence, and total lack of responsibility from a company.  There is NO accountability.  A RMA should not come back with an issue.  NIB has the excuse of a manufacturing defect, but a RMA is supposed to be sent back working.  The fact you had to firmware update it means they sent you a new one or this company is so irresistible it’s sending referbs without turning on the device and verifying it works.

As you said, Garmin has to be losing the money, but I have a feeling that handheld GPSs aren’t selling nearly as much and we are the very select few, especially with this unit being an expensive, heavy brick sized unit.  I think when it comes to handheld units, not only are we a niche customer base for Garmin and no where near the majority of their sales anymore, this unit in particular is becoming the black sheep of the companies lineup,  it’s the new GPSMAP (Remember the purple flat gps they sold that looked like a palm pilot?  I had that one too!) That device was definitely Garmins black sheep of a device at the time.  It had a lot of bugs, was under powered for what it promised and was quickly abandoned leaving those few of us who had bought it with a mess of a product they never fixed.  It was not like the GPSIII / V or the 60csx (owned all three of those too!  All great units, still have the 60csx) which were great products for their day.

I’ll say it again, because not only do I love being right, but when I used to work for government intelligence, I was tracked being right almost 95% of the time… This unit is underspecd for what it’s advertised to be able to do.  Firmware updates have increased the memory the OS needs to run and thus there is less available for the unit to use to run tasks.  There is a known issue with the antenna they used.  Someone else did a tear down and found part of the issue to be hardware related and specifically tied to the antenna part.  That doesn’t address the software related power offs that can be reproduced consistently when preforming specific things like adding a lot of waypoints in route planner when having a lot of maps installed,  Again, this is why I say that there are multiple issues going on with this device, it’s not one but several things causing the problems and probably the reason Garmin can’t pin down the problem.  

Remember, there aren’t many smart engineers working with these companies anymore they got rid of them in favour of “certain politics.”  My first Garman GPS was in the 90s and I have had many conversations with Garmin tech support, level II, level III, directly with Garmin design engineers, AND with two Garmin executives including their CFO at the time (early 2000’s and again mid 2000’s).  I’ve owned 4 Garmin car units, 4 watches, and 9 handhelds over the past 25ish years.  This doesn’t count at least 5 watches I have bought for relatives or girlfriends.  It doesn’t count the close to $1000 worth of maps I’ve bought over the years, some of which I can’t use anymore because Garmin shut down the activation server.  I bring all this up because I’ve had many conversations with this company and I’ve seen the quality of not only customer service but their tech support which has all gone downhill in the past 10 years.  It’s now impossible to get a hold of their engineering department and my personal feeling is everything is being designed overseas.  Remember this is no longer an American company it’s Swedish company now.  Everything changed, night and day.  The moment they got bought out everything changed.

I have a point with what I’m about to say and it’s not the equivalent of some flat earth nonsense.  Hear me out.  Don’t forget, Klous said they’re “going under the skin with their surveillance now” at last years WEF meeting.  He said it out loud.  The “crazies” think that means microchips in your head, but I’m pretty sure at least right now he’s talking about surveillance through wearables that record every minute of you life with sensors like the watches we wear that “look” under the skin (pulse, movement, sleep, etc).  The moment these companies decided it was more profitable to use people as the product (selling their data to advertisers) versus selling them a product (a gps unit), is the moment of the customer service (and privacy) died.  The way companies treat their consumers It’s quite obvious that they not only expect us to buy the product like we are obligated, but expect that we won’t care when doesn’t work and will just buy a new one when it comes out instead.  This is also why these companies keep failing and having to be bailed out or bought.  The only reason Garmin is still in business is because they bought out of their main competition.  

If there was another company with an actual product that could compete with what they have now, Garmin would be out of business, because no one would use them and deal with this nonsense.  As a parallel… It’s the reason Apple and a few android makers are still in business; because all the other competition got destroyed by those two companies in a targeted takedown (blackberry, palm, etc).  If someone else came out on the market with a better product, these companies would go away very quickly but it’s all rigged like most of business now a days.  Even the start-up websites like kickstarter are now all designed so no one can come on scene and challenge the status quo without being in bed with them by the way they now set it up.  It’s certainly not how they started off, but the powers that be realised that “randoms” can come on the scene and challenge their power, so it was all changed quickly.  As an analogy, they hate when the guy who works at the gas station wins $1 billion, because it gives someone not chained to the establishment some power, so now the system is rigged.  This all leads to companies like Garmin being able to get away with whatever they want, until the whole corrupt system collapses under its own weight.  As you said most businesses couldn’t operate losing money like they do on repeated RMAs, however if they don’t seem to care what does that say about the business?

Anyway, remember it or screenshot it, but I’m going to tell you one last time IMO behind the scenes this product has already been abandoned by Garmin.  It’s over 3 years old and still not fixed, they are sending out 2 to 3 RMS to people like yourself worth of broken devices, do you honestly have any notion this will actually get fixed?  My guess is they’ll kick the can down the road for another six months, and then next Q1 2024 release a new version.  It’ll probably have multiband (Receive L5) and definitely have more memory.  Lastly, it will almost definitely have a non removable battery to screw us customers with planned obsolescence.  At that time they will abandon this device.  Screen shot this last part because as I said I’m almost never wrong when I profile.  The only way you will “win” is in small claims court, because if you try superior for big money / big change / big accountability they will litigate you bankrupt like all big corrupt companies.  You can win small claims though and don’t need a lawyer, just some brains and time on your hands.  I still have to file the one for the non updated maps they sold me for $100 (city nav) and will include this obviously lemon of a device in the filing, but am litigating against two other companies right now and have plenty of time left to file against Garmin when I’m done with the other two against other companies for similar nonsense.  Get to know your states consumer protection laws.  Already won one case on top of those two I’m doing now. It’s turned into a full time job and I’m not even a lawyer, just really tenacious pissed off, scorned individual with a lot of free time.

Edit:  typos.