Guest mode?

“It's not like a guest mode is a rental only feature, or that its presence would bother other users, is it?”

Its mostly a rental only feature.

It's also one feature out of many. There might be features that many more people would rather have. There are bugs that people would rather get fixed than get this feature.

There are also useful/more-interesting features on the 1030+ that (hopefully) will get added to the 1030.

You can’t have everything.

It seems like this feature is less important than others.

There’s no good reason to rent the 1030.

Choosing to provide $600 1030s to people who would know enough to rent them who would find it more convenient and cheaper to just use their own personal device (setup the way they want) doesn't make much sense.

The point of providing rental GPS units is to people who don't have their own units. It makes more sense to rent them $250 units over $600 units having extra features they don't need or would know how to use,

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"Alternatively, an useful function for all models would be allowing different accounts (besides guest) and switching quickly, so that an unit could be shared with family members. Unless there's something like this already, I'm still learning how to use it.

That, of course, would be a bigger request and harder to achieve, but likely appreciated by more users."

This doesn't work out very well either (for Garmin). It means they get to sell fewer units. Plus, with selling fewer units and making less money, they would have the additional headache of having customers complaining that their data got loaded to the wrong account.

Even with those downsides, it would only work if family members took turns riding.

These are meant to be personal devices, like phones or watches. Neither of which have a lot of sharing going on (because it would typically just be a mess).