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Comment by fishpen0 | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why on traditional gps maps I prefer it to be very very zoomed out. It's far too common that mapping tools make something like a sudden second turn invisible to you until it is too late to switch lanes.

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I find that Apple Maps is typically pretty smart with its automatic zoom. For a typical intersection with just one turn to navigate, it will zoom in to give you a good sense of the lanes, stop signs/lights, etc. But when there are consecutive turns to navigate, or a heavily curved section of road (like highway on-ramps) it will zoom out and even rotate the map to show that upcoming context.

Apple Maps got really good at some point! I once pick it by accident for navigation, and never went back to Google Maps.

I think it may depend on where you are.

Around here (Long Island, NY), it's far better than Google Maps, and I use it all the time.

I've heard that it falls down, in rural areas, though.

I've used it almost exclusively since around 2019, but that has been in the Bay Area and LA area where the data has presumably been very good relative to other areas.

A few years ago I saw Apple Maps get things wrong in Cupertino!

I uninstalled Google Maps when it started draining my iPhone battery at an absurd rate. Apple Maps it is.

It’s unusable in Sydney, Australia.

It might be fine for pure navigation to addresses but business addresses and other metadata are often missing or out of date because people only bother to update Google Maps. Also that’s where all the reviews are.

I don’t want to use two different apps for navigation vs finding businesses.

Since the last time I tried, Apple Maps has come down from plotting some 30 petrol stations in the Sydney CBD to 2. There are in fact none.

Apart from needing to copy and paste destination addresses from Google/Google Maps every time I use Apple Maps, it's great.

Doesn't do bike routes at all in my country (Ireland) for some reason.

I have had an occasional problem where a large building ends up blocking my view, but in general it’s very good.

It's also pretty good about stacking up a second turn in the corner banner that shows your next maneuver

I remember for at least a while people would complain about how GPS navigation ruined their sense of the local area. Probably stopped hearing about it because people have just surrendered to the apps, but I think part of the reason is also that by default they were just zoomed in way too close. If you forced them back out a ways, I was actually learning a lot about my local area. Like, there's all these subdivisions around, you know, and from the outside who knows what connects to what, I'm not going to just duck in to a subdivision and physically navigate the streets to see how they're all connected, but driving around with the navigation made it much more clear... when it was zoomed out somewhat.

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