I use it all the time. In Portland it is as good as GMaps is at navigating fastest route during heavy traffic. Which is to say, not perfect, but adequate. It has yet to take me to the wrong location.
Yesterday I was trying to remember if this deli was on Howard or Folsom (and I forgot the exact name). The search results for 'deli' were basically everywhere on North America except for where I was (including across town). Searching for businesses with Apple Maps is nearly impossible, and the insistence upon installing the Yelp app to get more info is just infuriating.
Edit: Oh yeah and it can't find Grainger in Millbrae to save its life. Shit happens and business info is one of the hardest parts about mapping. Unfortunately Apple makes it damn near impossible to report problems to a real human.
Edit edit: My all time favorite though was asking Siri for directions to some club that I usually take BART to. I kept getting directions to a not that nearby and not that similarly named bail bondsman.
This is all anecdotal, which is kind of the issue, isn't it? I'm in the Bay Area, too, and I very rarely have any problems with Apple Maps. It isn't perfect, but it's absolutely not "pretty awful." I have no significant problems finding businesses with Apple Maps; I literally just typed "deli" and the first search suggestion that came up was "Delis - search nearby," and it, well, found delis nearby.
Problems due to long-term construction seem to be a weakness for it, but I've run into those issues with Google and Waze, too.
Even when I know the name I often have problems finding something in Apple Maps. Up in Marin, searching for "Apple Store" pulled up listings for the Apple Stores in the East Bay (the one in Corte Madera was significantly lower).
Or, if I'm looking for the specific address for the junk yard... for a while it would sort the results in seemingly random order. Right now it seems to at least be sorting by distance, but I think it default to heavily weighting towards what you were last looking at, which almost makes sense (but this seems to persist even if you move someplace else lending an utterly unpredictable feel to the results). This wouldn't be a huge problem but the distance is only shown for the top two results, and the city name is often truncated so chains will often be hard to distinguish from one another. Even better if I scroll up too far it backs out of the search itself and clears the search bar.
Edit: Oh yeah, and the deli was actually called a market (but I had also searched for market and only gotten results for Market Street).
Do you perhaps mean a (solid) quad yellow line (aka a painted island)? It's legal to turn left across a double yellow into a driveway, private road, cross street etc in California (and every other state I've lived in long enough to look up the laws) per [1], specifically (d). It's _not_ legal to pass on a solid double yellow.
[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
I'm pretty sure Van Ness only has a single set of double lines. What I remember from driver's ed is that you're allowed to turn into a driveway but that's about it. While it doesn't appear match up with the legal (or popular[1]) definitions, the DMV handbook[2] seems to indicate you're only allowed to make a U-turn or turn into a driveway on a double yellow.
That said, there are no left turn signs at every signaled intersection along Van Ness these days, and even if not there's so much traffic that a left turn from a busy state highway into a side street was just a blindingly stupid suggestion.
Today was fun. For the hell of it I fired up some walking directions. Instead of walking along the sidewalk, turning at major intersections Apple had me zig zag down an alley and then cross the next street in the middle of the block instead of at the signal.
1: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-08-10-me-4856-s...
2: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/traffic_l...
Click on POI, scroll down and select "Report an Issue" and similarly when a route is complete there is a reporting option.
So what happens when it's clear the route is all wrong and you don't want to follow it to its completion? And, honestly, while I remember a report problems thing at the end of a route I don't remember seeing it recently.
In addition to reporting wrong directions, you can also report the arrival entrance (ex: moving the pin into a parking lot vs. the entrance to the parking lot)
Where? If I go into the detailed list of directions nothing responds to taps and there's no "i" button, only a lonely "Done" button.
Privacy reasons aside, I just despise using GMaps for its clashing app styling on iOS and seemingly heavier battery usage. Apple Maps' design feels like it gets out of your way and focuses on the things that matter.