[ActiveCaptain]

Just to clear up some of the previous incorrect statements.

MaxSea TZ with all the modules (AIS, weather etc.) is more expensive than MacENC with a Macbook.

The full software with all charts for the US, weather, tides, currents, 3D, satellite imagery, etc is about $350 street price. You must be referring to the previous MaxSea software.

And you still need to buy the charts.

Totally false for the US. There is a full range of international charts available and they cost extra.

It true Maxsea TZ has great zoom in/out feature and the GUI is more suitable for touch-screens but that is due to FURUNO, who has bought MaxSea, to integrate TZ in their chart plotters.

TZ works exceptionally well (best, I think) with a wheeled mouse. Furuno, I believe, owns a minority stake in the company who owns MaxSea. It's interesting that the parent company has also just purchased Nobeltec from Jeppesen.

At our sailing club I did demo MacENC and a friend showed MaxSea TZ. He was impressed by the features of MacENC which costs only as much as an expansion module for MaxSea.

Again, different product. This is confusing the comparison.

In fact the only thing missing in MacENC is a true logbook, and automatic route planning using tides, currents and weather infos which do cost separately.

Once you see the zooming and panning, there's just no comparison. And these are only a few of the capabilities that TZ has above MacENC. I'd expect this though since MacENC is a much less expensive product.

The biggest issue with MaxSea is the electronic hardware dongle, if you loose it you can't use MaxSea anymore!

Incorrect again. Points again to a comparison against a completely different software product. There is no hardware dongle at all. You activate the software using an internet connection. I think there's a manual way to do it too. That's it. I have no dongle or any type of special hardware.

But what I do hear most times is that MaxSea TZ isn't as stable as MaxSea NavNet (the original MaxSea) and still does crash a lot.

I've been hitting it pretty hard and showing it to a bunch of people around the docks here in Charleston (we're currently at the Maritime Center continuing south in a couple of weeks). It hasn't crashed or had a problem yet...and I've really tried to make it crash.

It's hard to know what you've been "hearing" or if it even involves the same software product. From all of your other comments, you're referring to something completely different and not MaxSea TimeZero.

And Apple Mac mini or Macbooks Air do use less power than equivalent PCs.

That's one of the reasons I'm looking forward to seeing this run on my MacBook. It will be very sweet there.


If anyone is by any chance in the Charleston area, come on by and see it for yourself. I'm running it on a $399 Toshiba laptop (bought from BestBuy of all places). It screams on that computer. I could easily buy two (maybe three) Toshiba's with MaxSea TZ included for the price of my one MacBook Pro. That said, I want it on my Mac.