Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

I love this type of article, and the effort put into it - but the main thing I can't help but do is wonder what kind of person is driven to exhaustively research Apple Maps over a 5+ year period.

View on HN

> I love this type of article, and the effort put into it - but the main thing I can't help but do is wonder what kind of person is driven to exhaustively research Apple Maps over a 5+ year period.

I'm under the vague impression that Justin O'Beirne works in this space, so this isn't just a hobby. Can anyone confirm?

Edit: this article (https://www.businessinsider.com/google-maps-vs-apple-maps-ke...) describes him as "a map expert who helped work on Apple Maps." This article (https://medium.com/all-consuming/the-most-overlooked-touchpo...) describes him as "Head of Cartography at Apple."

He is also listed on several mapping-related patents for Apple over the past several years.[1] It seems surprisingly un-Apple-y to allow someone in that position to publish articles detailing the flaws in Apple maps, speculate about where they get their data and how the quality problems might affect unannounced future products.

1: https://patents.justia.com/inventor/justin-o-beirne

> It seems surprisingly un-Apple-y to allow someone in that position to publish articles detailing the flaws in Apple maps, speculate about where they get their data and how the quality problems might affect unannounced future products.

That tells me he no longer works at Apple. If he did, why would he need to speculate about Apple's internal processes based on what they publicly release? This article (https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-summer-of-google-maps-and-ap...) from 2017 even has him noting hits from Apple's website and tracking how long it took them to correct gaps he outlined.

Those two articles I linked were dated 2016 and 2017. Looking at his website, before that time it seems like he was mostly writing about Google Maps. So maybe he wrote about Google when he was at Apple, then started writing about Apple when he left.

There’s certainly overlap between the date stamps on his articles and his Apple patents. Not sure if someone might be listed as inventor on a patent filed after they left.

There are probably a lot of teams working on different aspects of the maps, so he wouldn’t automatically be privy to everything because he’s worked on one aspect of the product.

Yes he used to work at Apple in the Maps team for many years but left a few years ago... thus his guess.

Why did he leave the Maps team?

I will also say it took way too long to get to the point. Several points that could've been made with 1-2 examples had 5-6. It got a little exhausting.

After too much scrolling just now, I remember a similar-looking article, also about Apple Maps, from a few years ago that was probably from this same blog.

His style is way too many illustrations and a few lines of text in between. Feels buzzfeedy. Sorry, just not for me.

Disagree. I enjoyed the investigative style and liked being able to follow along as the author laid out the evidence.

I’d rather see how the they came to their conclusions than read a bunch of bullet points.

I still went through it until it got to the SHORTCUTS section. At that point I got frustrated wondering what this pivot was all about and how much longer this article was going to go on until it got to the point (as many here have said) of what he wants to say. Sure, evidence, but the many tables and images that I had to focus on to interpret just distract from the flow of the story. Too many! There are also too many maps trying to show coverage, they don't take too much brain power to interpret, but after the first 3 I thought "yeah yeah yeah, I fucking get it".

Obviously it's a free world to disagree, but if I were his editor I'd tell him his blog posts are ineffective because it's rambling, and if he presents it more concisely, more people would appreaciate it.

Someone else pointed out that some of his earlier articles (written in the same style) got >1000 points on HN:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358902 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653

Do you also think these were bad / annoying to read?

(The reason I ask is because I started a newsletter at the beginning of the year and have been trying to emulate his style. But if people genuinely hate it, then I obviously don’t want to follow it. :))

Yes they were annoying to me, and that's why I remembered them.

Upvotes might not mean much, maybe other information addicts saw a dense page and "ooh, endorphins, upvote".

After a certain point it just got exhausting to follow. Reading is simple, but looking at images so I can agree with the conlusion he made tasks the brain.

Oh, the moat article even has footnotes that scrolls to the end of the page and you then have to click back... god damn, how!!!

If he was in a conference room presenting a slideshow (each image being a slide), how long would his presentation be? At what point does he lose the majority of the audience? At least with slides people usually point out what they want you to pay attention to, and they don't do 7 slides of examples for one point (like the "look, Google Maps has outlines of buildings!" in the moat article).

Thank you for your response!

I appreciate his thoroughness, it just makes it hard to read when the reader doesn't actually care about seeing every single data point. I would prefer he give an "abstract" at the top and then go into all the details below.

His earlier Apple Maps article ended up getting 1250 points on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358902

And an earlier one than that got 1960: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653

So clearly some people like this style of article (myself included).

FWIW, I didn't notice any point that had 5 or 6 examples.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com