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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

Look at any mapping provider: Google, Bing, Ovi/Nokia, TeleAtlas, OSM... They are ALL way better than Apple. Apple allegedly is using OSM data, yet their maps are ridiculously bad compared to OSM. Town names are missing, there are next to no terrain features at all. Even the coloring is bad (low contrast etc.)

And then there is sattelite imagery, which is sort of fine in the US. But the rest of the world is low resolution, is partly covered in clouds, badly color corrected and partly black and white.

And then there are no public transportation directives and no sensible terrain view.

Apple released a crap product. Aerials won't get better 'the more peopl euse it'. Neither will maps grow more detailed. It's not like people can collaborate to make them better.

To me, those maps seriously diminished the worth of my devices. And this response makes me want to buy an Android phone. It is frankly insulting.

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Looks like without Jobs at the helm, quality and customer satisfaction began suffering almost immediately.

It's kind of silly to say that - Apple under Jobs did make several mistakes, over the history of the company. It's just that your recent image of Jobs is someone who was consistently successful, but even there Ping is a good counter example.

To look at a single flaw and then say "oh this is because Jobs is no longer there" is without warrant. Now, if there is a systematic decline in quality of products and services over several months/years, your claim begins to carry more weight.

Well ping may have been unsuccessful, but it didn't harm the customer's experience. People who weren't interested simply didn't use it. In the case of Apple's new maps app, they've actually removed functionality customers came to rely on and replaced it with an inferior product.

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Could you elaborate?

Meanwhile I'm having the opposite experience: my phone is more valuable today than it was yesterday.

The driving directions are quite nice, it's vector based so the map can rotate any which way, I think the colors are better at locating nearby green space to visit, and I can click on local restaurants to right to their Yelp reviews. Given the angry mob I was expecting to hate it, but I've actually been impressed.

I think it has a lot to do with where you live, how well Apple localized it for your language, and what features you care about (ex: driving vs. transit).

Isn't google map data vector based too? Their maps rotate on android..

Never on iOS though. Most of the features Google added to the Android version of Maps never made it to iOS, for whatever reason (be it Apple not allowing it or Google decided they didn't want to).

Didnt the old iOS app only use googles data? So, the features have always been in Apples hand.

I don't own an android phone. I'm only comparing my iOS map app from yesterday to my iOS map app today.

Interesting. It mostly read like a comparison to an Android phone from almost three years ago.

I'm not sure Apple had done much to update their Maps app in 5 years.

Apple doesn't seem to be using OSM data in Maps, they're getting it from TomTom. They experimented with OSM in iPhoto, not sure what happened there.

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