Hacker News Reader

Garmin sort of intentionally did this to set up a moat, after their GPS business went the way of the dodo.

If by GPS you specifically mean car navigation. Because almost the entirety of Garmin as a company is built around putting GPS into various things including wearables.

But even in automotive they pivoted to working with car OEMs instead of relying on sale of independent devices.

Never seen a Garmin car navigation device.

Aerospace, Garmin was, is, and probably will be big

They were definitely a major player for a long time prior to smartphones becoming the number one GPS solution (for most cars). Garmin, TomTom, Magellan, etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u-sGHMivwo

I remember their in car navigation being huge in the 2000s in the US, maybe 2005 or so was their peak, before that they were very expensive. Probably a lot of people know the brand just for that.

Might be US-specific thing then, or at least they were not very present in the Central/Eastern Europe

Garmin it's still heavily used in boats among other things.

I wouldn't want to go into the lobster season without the ability to track my pods.

Probably their largest business segment at the moment is aviation tech, as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com