I don't think Apple gets a pass here. If they are forcing users onto their product it had better be competitive, no matter how hard it is. Microsoft got so such pass with WP7 and that was an entirely new OS/platform!
I think Apple made the right move. Even if Google is 10 years ahead in mapping, the experience you got on the iPhone was Google maps from 2004. So Apple is only 2 years behind 'iOS 5 Google Maps' and given the resources they have to throw at the problem it'll probably improve quicker than that.
I can only see 3D maps as a gimmick, so I can't bring myself to care too much that it's broken. I'm slightly surprised that feature shipped in that state, but meh.
What I care about: can it get me where I'm going? It's 2012 and I've still found nothing that can do that without occasional issues. This version of Maps hasn't been in my hands long enough to judge it properly. Considering the update was just released to the general public less than 48 hours ago, has anyone had time to judge it properly?
Worth noting: I've had the old Maps try to send me through concrete walls, or direct me 400 miles away looking for the nearest branch of a bank. My dedicated GPS unit has told me I've arrived at my destination… in the middle of a busy highway, and it too has asked me to turn through concrete barriers more than once. I've had both direct me to locations well off of where I was trying to go.
This is all from actual usage.
So if anyone knows of something that doesn't have these problems, I'd love to hear from you!
Most errors seem to be that of string parsing - the biggest sin is not recognizing town/state portions of search strings consistently.
Ironic since I'd bet some of the best language parsing people are busy working on llvm and clang somewhere else on apple campus.
It's not just the quality of the maps that's an issue. It's also the quality of search. Google maps isn't perfect either but on top of having better map data is has better search so for example searching for "gauteir exhibit, sf" actually finds the De Young Museum in San Francisco even though I didn't name the museum nor did I spell the name correctly. IOS6 maps just said "no results"
Here are screenshots of an example situation I ran into yesterday, while trying to pick up my iPhone 5 from the UPS Customer Center:
But I agree that anyone buying a new phone is stuck with iOS 6.
Also, while the 3GS (June 09) is getting ios6, the original ipad (April 2010) is not. Apple will abandon their equipment just as fast if it suits them.
Indeed. I am quite frustrated that my first-gen iPad is, for whatever reason(s), not deemed worthy enough of iOS 6.
Oh, come on.
nor is Apple blocking Google Maps on the browser
And nor are they allowing third party apps to integrate into the OS in the way their Maps app does.
The voice limitation appears to be simply planned obsolescence; Waze can handle it without issues. This is a slap in the face to someone who paid a lot of money to Apple for a current-generation phone a little over a year ago.
Apple's closed platform has worked only because they've been able to give consumers such a high-quality experience. I think this fiasco will be a big wake-up call to lots of iPhone owners about how Apple's limitations can hurt them.
You can't restore from a pre-upgrade backup?
That's the cost of being inside a walled garden. You don't even have the freedom to install previous firmwares on your device.
But since the browser is part of a firmware upgrade it would be a terrible idea anyway, a new security bug has been found on mobile safari recently, you don't want to stay on older fimrwares if you can help it. Google maps, or a secure browser ? Pick one.
Awesome!
After 5 versions of the OS, people have what amounts to a beta application without any fallback as of yet. A major feature of the device was discarded.
Kind of hard to put trust in a company that will disregard users like that. And, to be fair, this is not new or surprising. It's one thing to do this on the hardware front. But another thing entirely to do it on the software front.
Keep in mind, this is not the first time they've done this (see the FCP debacle), and when that happened, they caved to customer demand.
So yes, it's a Maps thing.
not that i'm aware of. i don't believe there to be a browser interface for their maps "solution". i could be wrong.
> are there other maps program available on the ios devices?
yes. google maps, or any other maps via the browser. sure, not the kind of integration one gets from an app. but there, nevertheless.
Furiousness is a skill. Tim Cook falls short here.
And SJ, while he was leading Apple, was always without fault?
If that's the case, how do you explain Ping? MobileMe? The G4 Cube?
As far as what Jobs would have done; the state of the maps is a plain embarrassment - I can't see why anyone has released this, let alone anyone with as much care about details as Jobs.
So, camera and maps are clearly not the primary features influencing smartphone buyers.
Now everybody knows that Apple's history with cloud-based initiatives have been less than stellar, and no time was that more clear than during Apple's klunky MobileMe rollout a few years ago. Server down time and extremely slow loading times had many wondering how Apple let a product that seemed beta at best roll out to the masses - for a $99 fee no less.
The MobileMe fiasco was of course not lost on Steve Jobs who reportedly told members of the MobileMe team that they "should hate each other for having let each other down."
At one point, Jobs asked his team what MobileMe was supposed to do. Upon receiving an answer he quickly fired back, "So why the f doesn’t it do that?" Jobs even invoked the name of trusty ally Walt Mossberg - who was critical of MobileMe - to drive home the point that the MobileMe rollout was a flop.
"Mossberg," Jobs said, "our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.
Source: http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/steve-jobs-mobile...
Jobs was a marvelous CEO, but Apple made many missteps – some larger than the current uproar over iOS 6 maps app – while he led the company. Without having personally knew the man, one cannot claim what SJ would have done in this situation. Plain and simple.
A lot of the problems people are having with maps seem glaringly obvious and a lot of developers were raising red flags on this during the iOS 6 beta.
At the announcement it was couched as "Exchange for the rest of us" – it was trying to outdo a competitor's product. (To say nothing for how it countered many of the features Google was trumpeting for Android…)
SJ was absolutely aware of MobileMe, and was intimately involved with many parts of the product.
And, given all of that, it still was a flop of a launch. A launch that was so bad, I'm sure it was a motivating factor in the iCloud rebranding.
And to claim the G4 Cube was a minor product is just amusing. SJ was incredibly proud of that machine when he announced it. And you know he was deeply involved in its design, from day one.
@philwelch is right. It's a work of bloody art. It's in MoMA's permanent design collection for a reason. It's the Neil Armstrong of personal computing. If it's a mistake then so was Newton's Principia, the Declaration of Independence, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Seriously, it's that good.
If you're going to slag on something, slag on the hockey puck mouse. THAT really was a POS.
(back in the day Macs were for oldies who didn't know what the hell they were doing on a computer so Apple products didn't really register with me at the time)
My first impressions are that it looks like a plastic rubbish bin.
I always loved the G5 tower though.
You can play this game with just about everything Apple has sold since this machine was introduced. Virtually all of it has some design cue that can be traced back to the Cube, and no further. It really was the Genesis Box.
then again, they do need the crowdsourced data, but maybe they could have had the iOS 5 app stream a duplicate of whatever it's phoning home to google into the new Maps databank.
Well, around tech circles, Apple and Google frequently get more free passes compared to Microsoft.
And that's kind of funny because Nokia just put out a comparison with Apple and Google maps to cash in on this hoopla.
http://conversations.nokia.com/2012/09/20/benchmarking-mobil...
Then Apple and Google "divorced" while the iPhone was exploding, Google basically stopped improving Maps on iOS (all features went to Android), and here we are today, with the best-selling smartphone falling 5 years behind. Not Apple's finest moment.
incorrect: maps was an apple app that use google maps service. So it was apple that stopped improving maps on Ios
For instance, when Google launched turn-by-turn navigation for Android they said that it'd be available on the iPhone as well before long. That never happened.
Do you have evidence of this? I find the history of this fascinating and have my own theories (that I've posted elsewhere), but this is a pretty definitive statement that isn't the way I imagined things going down.
The post focuses on the reach of their maps by showing lots of numbers in a comparison. They would better demonstrate their point with side by side pictures, like the ones from OP of this thread.
Personally, I wonder about the reach of this marketing angle. I take 2 international trips per year. I'm in the same city 330+ days/year. I don't care if the maps work in Columbia or South Africa. I just want it to work well where I live!
So do people in Columbia and South Africa. :)
I'm also in the same city for the vast majority of the year, but I already know how to get from home to work and back.
Microsoft used up their free passes almost 20 years ago now.