Originally Posted by
atwl77
My beef with things like this, is that it is a form of "online hardware activation", which is a concept that I am against in principle. I understand that for certain devices there needs to be activation especially when there is a related law or mandate (drones, in particular), but as a general thing - I say no to hardware activation. If I bought a piece of hardware from the store (whether that be a cycling computer, an action camera, a tv, a toaster, or whatever), I expect it to be usable without needing to connect to the Internet to "activate" it first.
I don't have an opinion on drones or cameras or whatever, but let's use the wahoo element bolt as an example, because I have one, I'm familiar with it, and this is a cycling forum not a general electronics forum. You have to pair the bolt with your phone to connect it to the internet the first time and to set up the pages and metrics you want to see on each page. Both of those things would be super clunky if you had to do it with the arrow buttons on the unit, and the thing wouldn't work at all if it couldn't connect to wifi. It's just much easier to do that with my phone than to have to connect it to the laptop every time I want to connect to a new hotspot or modify a page view. I have been at the start of a brevet, realized that I loaded the wrong route, connected to my phone and loaded the right one in under 5 minutes. I would have been screwed with an etrex in that situation. I'm all for privacy and everything, but I still don't get it with a gps headunit that essentially can't function the way they are intended without being connected to the internet.