According to an article at the verge, GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman confirmed a new 360-degree GoPro Max camera “is in the works and will be worth the wait” at the GoPro 12 launch event.
This is pretty exciting. The GoPro Max is currently our recommended 360 camera for Mapillary - and I’m excited to see what the Max 2 brings!
I am happy that you are excited. However, GoPro MAX and all is fine and dandy but the truth is that as these cams are currently priced they are basically prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of potential contributors or even existing contributors. Not to mention that GoPro has never taken the mapping use case seriously, except maybe for some mediocre Google Maps support/integration. 360° is all fine but it demands roughly 4× the resolution and twice the sensor size (or two sensors) of standard cameras in order to get comparable image quality results to existing affordable cameras. You also need one or two high quality glass lenses (good luck with cheap plastic lenses). Furthermore, 360° cameras on cars without properly long extension mounts are basically useless. It is far easier and cheaper to use two cameras with overlapping views of sight at the front and on the side on a car’s roof than trying to put one camera on a long stick. In many places, you will be stopped by police at best and denunciated by weary residents at worst for doing this, even though you won’t be doing anything illegal. So yeah, 360° developments are appreciated but imho GoPro has never been the go to camera maker for mapping.
Should I ever spend 600 to 700 bucks for a mapping camera then I want proper platform integration, decent image quality (so that I can read details for mapping instead of smudges), a decent GPS receiver (which does not require repositioning of images, especially in urban canyons) and long battery life. So, looking at these requirements and the existing market then things look rather bleak.
I hope they won’t remove the Gnss receiver as with the Hero 12 
I disagree. I have been using my GoPro Max for city mapping, and the end product is far more usable then with non-360° cameras in my opinion. Of course this all depends on what the user is trying to do. I capture all my images on a bike or on foot. Having an extended GoPro Max on my helmet or even longer pole on a backpack have been great setups so far. The MAX is not very expensive, considering professional 360° cameras with full Google Street View integration like the Insta360 Pro costs 10x what the GoPro Max does. If I am not completely mistaken, 360 cameras provide better data to do things like SfM.
Just read the Management Commentary on the Q4/24 results. Sadly there wasn’t so much information, but it’s at least something
Key takeaways:
Let’s hope the entry level 360° will have GPS.
Here the entire paragraph:
Recent and upcoming events related to the 360-camera market include our recent release of a
powerful, totally new and enhanced 360 editing experience in the Quik app, complete with
impressive subject tracking, intuitive keyframe-based reframing and more. And later this month
we’ll begin selling a refreshed MAX 360-camera to serve as an entry-level 360 SKU ahead of
the highly anticipated availability of our MAX2 360-camera later this year. And of course, MAX
will be compatible with all the new aforementioned features in the updated Quik app.
And speaking of MAX2, we’re excited about the progress we’ve made on what we believe are
innovative capabilities that will redefine the 360-camera market and position MAX2 as the
world’s most impressive 360-camera. Innovation can be hard, and we’re proud of our engineers
who’ve stayed committed to making MAX2 into something truly special – we cannot wait to
launch it later this year
Looking forward to seeing what they launch!
Seems they added AI. Nice price but same video specs. No mention of GPS - must be removed?
https://gopro.com/en/us/news/gopro-announces-updated-max-360-camera-and-quik-reframe-editing
Another announcement with discussion
https://www.dpreview.com/news/5873209898/gopro-quietly-announces-a-refresh-of-its-max-360-action-camera
I am not excited. 
The 
competition already has 8K devices on the market and the 
action cam market leader with a net loss of 53 million USD in 2023 has no better idea than to push new firmware on old hardware (released in October 2019!) with AI gizmos which wear out in a day and then become nothing more than bloatware that gets in your way when capturing content. 
This happens when you listen to AI stock market fortune 
tellers instead of your customers because you think that no matter what you do or do not do, nobody can threaten your market position. Nokia thought so too. And then, Microsoft thought the same way when they threw good money at dying Nokia. 
happens in life with a bonus for the leadership. C’est la vie 
It looks like GPS is still on the camera, the tech specs list “GPS Enabled”. Agreed that the resolution is disappointing, will be worthwhile to test to get a more detailed look.
So disappointing… Old hardware, only extra software support, what I never use. O yeah, the changed the color of the GoPro logo to blue, wow…
I only want a 8k 360 camera with GPS support, that shouldn’t be difficult to make?
Developing cutting edge hardware isn’t particularly easy either. But, the GoPro MAX is almost 6 years old by now. This is a lot of time. GoPro should have something new and better in the drawer already. Maybe they have been pushed back to the end of the queue or excluded from some deal by semiconductor makers because production capacities in this industry are still recovering from COVID disruption? GoPro usually had a well ahead of time hardware road map. We don’t know what really happened. And now, prospects of looming tariffs on electronics and other parts surely won’t help GoPro’s business and technology progress either.
At least the new price (349$/399€) is more captivating than the old one.