Is it realy  the end for the older garmin models when it comes to map updates?

A partial YES, garmin only wants to sell new models and they stopped the support for the older models. I said a partial YES,  because there is something happening in the world of  the mapmakers.

In the year 2004 Steve Coast started with a project to make mapdata available for the public. This project is called Openstreetmap. A huge team of volunteers is working on the database to get is as complete as possible. Thansk to donations of Automotive Navigation Data, US Census TIGER and others, the database made a big leap forward.

This databse motivated a lot of other people to generate maps based on this database. One of the biggest collections of maps I’ve found on the internet is the Cloudmade collection.

Beside the last download link, you will find a lot of other download links here

If you want to read more about this project or you think that you can contribute then check out de Wiki and the openstreetmaps forum.