How Accurate is Apple Maps in Canada's Largest Province?

Also, it looks like he counted a server error as a bad map result. Maybe the server was throttling him or the server is otherwise overloaded?

A better attempt would be to use Wikipedia as a reference for places which (a) exist and (b) are non-trivial. Also he should cross reference against Google since that is the current standard in mapping.

I haven't been back there for many years, but as I understand it, "Sudbury" can now be better defined by naming the few Northern Ontario municipalities it doesn't yet include. If the X marking the spot is not in Timmins, Espanola/Nairn, Mattawa or the Sound, but somewhere in between those points, it's probably "in Sudbury", on paper at least.

(For you foreigners, that territory includes a moderately-sized urban/commercial/industrial centre, several small hard-rock mining towns, some of the best farmland in Canada, forestry, quarrying, a small inland fishery ... you know, the sort of mixture that's obviously best administered by calling the whole thing one big happy municipality.)

The problem is that either Apple have rights to this data source, in which case they should just be fusing it together with their other data. Or they don't have rights, in which case they can't use the results of this comparison to fix data without also risking tainting said data. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know where the line would be drawn. But automatically or manually filing data bug reports based on results like these seems very dodgy.

Second, automatically generating and filing hundreds or thousands of bugs would just render the submission channels useless. Just triaging geocoding bugs requires ridiculous amounts of skilled human effort by people whose time would most likely be better spent in fixing the geocoder. It might be different for things known to be guaranteed data bugs, but then your methodology certainly shouldn't involve a geocoder. And you'd run into the rights issues of the previous paragraph.

There are good ways of doing automatic quality evaluation or semi-automated quality improvement. But they're really going to be more sophisticated. And unless Apple's expensively bought maps people are totally incompetent, they are already doing such things.

(Edit: I don't mean to belittle the efforts of the original poster. It's good that somebody tried to quantify the quality of Apple maps rather than relying purely on anecdotal evidence. I just don't think that it's a method that'd have much relevance to the way Apple works.)

I agree, this is fast, but not in the way you mean.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/20/technology/apple-most-valuab...

Arguably a much more catastrophic failure, though limited in scope by a smaller user base.

Apple went on to fix those issues in Mobile Me, rebrand it iCloud, and everything has been gravy ever since. Apple's stock price went from $175 in August that year down to $97 that October. Today it stands at $667.

So if you could, given this context, explain what makes iOS 6 maps point to deterioration in the company in a way that Mobile Me did not. You will receive bonus points if you manage to do so without invoking a red herring in form of the death of Steve Jobs.