The Pro and Sapphire watches, and all of the 6x watches, have maps Most of the Solar ones do but some of the recent ones are non-Pro.
Anything that doesn’t come with maps doesn’t come with enough storage to install them or the code to handle them. Can you link to the exact unit you're looking at?
Maps mean more storage. So Pro and Saphire models with map support has external storage chips on the watch motherboard. Non pro watches has maybe around 64 MB of storage. However, watches with maps has 16 or 32 GB of storage. Also maps require more memory to load map data and work on it. Fenix 5X had 32 MB and Fenix 6X Pro has 16 MB RAM chip in addition to onboard SRAM's on the CPU. However, non pro models only use the SRAM memory on the chips which was abput 256 KB on old watches and now probably around 1 MB or I don't know actually.
Maps on watch are mostly useful for me and I like them. However, mst people thinks they're slow and hard to see on a small screen. So not everybody prefers to pay the extra for the maps.
Thanks for the advice guys.. I had not been careful, I wanted a 47mm watch with a silver bezel, but not sapphire, solar or titanium (all above budget), and had not noticed that the only "standard" model with a silver bezel does not have the Pro functions.
In hindsight, what do I *really* miss on my current Fenix 5 Plus? New functions are always nice.. but I wouldn't want to be without maps ever! If I need them, it's always unexpected, and the one thing that's always with me is my watch.
Too be perfectly honest, if I go anywhere where I think I might need a map, I’d take one even if they were on my watch. Granted I am very unlikely to go anywhere were I’d be surprised at the unexpected need for a map as I’m boring like that.
