Who at Fortune deserves to be fired for its recent long string of incredibly idiotic articles about Apple, which have been panned here and elsewhere, then?
I think the new Maps app is fantastic; the data accuracy leaves a bit to be desired, but I notice that those doing the most high-profile complaining point to errors in rural England, rural Ontario, etc. Here in the Bay Area, the data is working fine for me as well.
It is not shocking to me that a map database that is a few months old is less mature than one like Google's, which is the product of a decade's effort, and also the product of 5 years' worth of improvements riding the back of iOS users' crowd-sourced data. Now Apple has that data coming into its database, instead of flying out the door to Google's.
Maps is likely to improve, and fast.
In any case, blaming Forstall is idiotic and talking about firing him is Fortune-level idiotic. He made great things at NeXT, Mac OS X is great, Siri is great, and Maps is a work in progress that shows great promise.
Have you tried reloading map data and zooming in and out on maps in Google Maps vs. Apple Maps in an area with EDGE or otherwise bad internet coverage? Apple's app wins hands-down versus reloading non-vector map tiles.
Newsflash: A lot of people live in rural England, rural Ontario and Rural Holland. Besides, it can't find places like central station in Amsterdam (hardly rural). I don't care whether it's the app or the data, I don't care that it's working great in the bay area. What I do care about is that I had a perfectly working mapping solution, and now I have a second class thing that's just not working. I don't know about you, but IMHO having wrong directions is even worse than having no directions.
"Antennagate" wasn't a big deal? When my wife used her iPhone 4 it would drop calls constantly (pretty decent AT&T coverage, Columbus, Ohio). She even had it replaced due to the issue (which wasn't fixed until she put a case on it).
Ah, I see that too. Clearly problematic since there doesn't seem to be a way at all to load up the intended 428 University Ave address. No good.
Still though, "really really bad" makes me think you have experienced many other issues. I'm genuinely curious about how Maps performs in the places it is "supposed" to be at least passable. Got any other examples?
Meta: please don't edit your comments to respond to sub-comments. It makes the flow of the conversation very difficult to follow and makes my previous comment seem irrelevant and out of place.
Both David Pogue and Anil Dash have written about getting driving directions that takes them to the wrong location in places like New York city.
I'm just one user, but if a navigation app takes you the right address in the wrong location in a place like the Bay area or NYC, that's a "really bad" problem.
Not in my experience. It's fine here, at least in the city and in Berkeley. No problems aside from a few addresses needing me to add "sf" to them to avoid having them go to different cities (which sometimes also occurred with Google's map data).
I'm working on a routing/location based app right now. Out of curiosity could you give examples of what you mean by "really bad"?
True, and I granted that point already. However, a lot of people live in China, too, and it's being widely reported that Apple Maps is much better than Google Maps' data, in China. I'll just give one link, but a little googling around proves the point quite well:
You didn't have a perfectly working solution before, btw; Google Maps still has a lot of errors.
And what you have now is both Google Maps (via Safari), and also a new Maps app that is internally superior and relies on a less-mature dataset which will mature quickly and give Google some much-needed motivation to improve its data as well. I'm not sure why this is such a big disaster.
Edit: By the way, Apple Maps finds Amsterdam Centraal (not "Central") Station just fine, if you spell it correctly. I just checked; it finds the exact same place as Google Maps.
Defending the maps app as "a few months old" does not excuse the fact that it is not as good as the app it replaced. I'm sure it will improve in the future and may lead to improvements in all map apps as a result of increased competition.
I didn't defend the maps app in that way; I was defending the immaturity of the map data.
The app, as I said, is superior in my opinion to the Google Maps app. It zooms better, loads faster, looks better, has better layout, is prettier, and has turn-by-turn directions and 3D features that were absent in the Google Maps app. Remember that the app and its functionality is completely separate from the database it points to. None of the map data is stored in the app.
In a, probably unintended, way, I believe you've nailed the nail on its head: Apple excels at making aesthetic beautiful stuff, which looks good and feels good. But maps are about details and accuracy, otherwise they're useless.
This is going to be the real test for Apple. They need to fix stuff, they know that, it will be interesting to see when improvements will be noticible.
Cook spoke of 500 million searches in two weeks. If only 1 promille triggered a feedback or "report problem", that would be 500.000 change requests. How can you brute-force this massive amount of data?
A quick Google search will tell you that there are non-trivial problems all over the world in major cities at major landmarks with Apple maps.
It's nice that you agree with the parent poster that Apple Maps are fantastic, but let me say that I don't think so. There are far too many obvious and MAJOR cockups (eg. Hong Kong is misplaced - it's not even on the island, Tokyo's main railway is missing, etc.) ... but you think that's Fantastic??
I will point you to Garmin and TomTom as two examples of maps that FAR exceed Apple's "fantastic" offering.
In 6 months time, the landscape will (hopefully) be different ... but to call this offering fantastic is ignorant.
Maps are an interesting area for bikeshedding to occur, because any two people can both be experts in their area yet both experience wildly different results.
I think the new Maps app is fantastic; the data accuracy leaves a bit to be desired, but I notice that those doing the most high-profile complaining point to errors in rural England, rural Ontario, etc. Here in the Bay Area, the data is working fine for me as well.
It is not shocking to me that a map database that is a few months old is less mature than one like Google's, which is the product of a decade's effort, and also the product of 5 years' worth of improvements riding the back of iOS users' crowd-sourced data. Now Apple has that data coming into its database, instead of flying out the door to Google's.
Maps is likely to improve, and fast.
In any case, blaming Forstall is idiotic and talking about firing him is Fortune-level idiotic. He made great things at NeXT, Mac OS X is great, Siri is great, and Maps is a work in progress that shows great promise.
Have you tried reloading map data and zooming in and out on maps in Google Maps vs. Apple Maps in an area with EDGE or otherwise bad internet coverage? Apple's app wins hands-down versus reloading non-vector map tiles.