Tim Cook Calls Apple Maps Launch His 'First Really Big Mistake' as CEO (macrumors.com) 75
In a recent town hall meeting reported by Bloomberg (paywalled), Apple CEO Tim Cook named the troubled 2012 launch of Apple Maps as his "first really big mistake" in the role. "The product wasn't ready, and we thought it was because we were testing more of local kind of stuff," Cook told staff. MacRumors reports: Reflecting on the debacle, Cook said it was "valuable," noting that he expressed regret to users at the time and suggested they use competing navigation apps instead.
"We apologized for it, and we said, 'Go use these other apps. They're better than ours.' And that was some humble pie," Cook said. "But it was the right thing for our users. And so it's an example of keeping the user at the center of the decisions that we made." Cook added: "Now we've got the best map app on the planet. We learned about persistence, and we did exactly the right thing having made the mistake."
"We apologized for it, and we said, 'Go use these other apps. They're better than ours.' And that was some humble pie," Cook said. "But it was the right thing for our users. And so it's an example of keeping the user at the center of the decisions that we made." Cook added: "Now we've got the best map app on the planet. We learned about persistence, and we did exactly the right thing having made the mistake."
Never got the hate (Score:4, Insightful)
I never got the hate for Apple Maps, even in the first year or two after release. Apple clearly could not let themselves become captive to Google/Google Maps to a degree they would never be able to overcome, so they had to move forward with something. And even outside SoCal it was OK if not great in the US (I understand international maps took a long time to catch up, but that was true of Google Maps too). I think I used it 2/3 of the time after the first year of stabilization and it worked well enough.
Now one can criticize Apple for not using a tiny bit of their store of cash to speed up the process of expanding their own geomapping database, and I so criticized them at the time. But that didn't mean the product was some sort of failure because it wasn't.
Re:Never got the hate (Score:5, Insightful)
I never got the hate for Apple Maps, even in the first year or two after release.
You think being told to make a hard turn off the side of a bridge, or being sent to a completely wrong destination is good?
that didn't mean the product was some sort of failure because it wasn't.
Holy fucking shit, the RDF is real. The CEO of Apple himself says it was a failure, which we already knew because he told people to use the competing solutions, and you disagree with him because you have to believe in the myth of Apple's competence. It's truly mind boggling.
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Now? No. At launch? Absolutely. Fuck you for excusing a company launching a broken product. You are the problem.
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For me in a large west coast city in the US. It was great. I get that it wasn't great for a lot of people, but I can't be hostile towards something that I have used 100% of the time since its launch and found it to be easier to look at and just as accurate as the Google's. I'm sorry it didn't work for you, but it worked really well for me. And Apple gets and deserves my praise as much as your scorn.
When Apple Maps launched, it didn't have turn-by-turn navigation support at all, while the google maps that it replaced did.
Apple absolutely launched it before it was ready, taking existing functionality away when doing so.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20120922233922/http://www.apple.com/iphone/built-in-apps/
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For me in a large west coast city in the US. It was great.
Congrats. That is pointed out by Tim Cook himself. He isn't apologising to you, he's apologising to the rest of the world for producing a product that was utterly useless in the most basic capacity on launch.
I lived in a city with a population of 800000 people at the time, and apparently that city was in the middle of the fucking pacific ocean. Happy for you that it worked for you, stop gaslighting everyone else.
Re: Never got the hate (Score:1)
Re:Never got the hate (Score:4, Informative)
It still sucks big time.
It is faster than Google Maps but that is due to the complete lack of information and features.
Re:Never got the hate (Score:4, Interesting)
It still sucks big time.
It is faster than Google Maps but that is due to the complete lack of information and features.
You've convinced me to try it again.
G Maps, like G Search, has been calculating the fastest route to the destination called Unusability due to the complete bloat of "information and features" that help them monetize use. Meanwhile it is failing at core functions of a map.
For example, their UI/display always seems to have plenty of room to cram in a bunch of payola business listings in an area - sometimes drastically zooming out of my original search area to show them to me - but never seems to have room to just, you know, show me all the businesses matching the specific keywords I entered, within the specific area I searched.
It has so much room for featured/sponsored listings, even though I know for a fact there are numerous other locations matching my search within that same half mile.
It has so much room for featured/sponsored listings whose popup pins/labels take up screen space, but it still doesn't have room on the map for, you know, the names of the actual streets, which randomly disappear as you browse, so that you have to zoom way in or way out trying to get a picture of an area that actually maps that area.
Their AI is being trained to watch my face as I sleep and tell me what I dreamed last night as well as the meaning of the dream, but they can't figure out how to dynamically adjust the typeface of the 12 characters in "MLK Jr. Blvd" so they stay visible as I zoom in and out on a city neighborhood?
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they can't figure out how to dynamically adjust the typeface of the 12 characters in "MLK Jr. Blvd" so they stay visible as I zoom in and out on a city neighborhood?
This seems to be quite complicated. I have experience labeling maps with QGIS, ArcGIS online, and UMN mapserver, and it's kind of a PITA in all cases. It took me quite a bit of thrashing around with QGIS to come up with a map labeling style which actually checked every box, and never really got there with the others. That is, roughly:
All labels both legible and not obscuring anything
Full names of all visible streets shown
No label is closer to a street it isn't labeling than one which it is
Labels repeat only
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I find Google Maps to be the best option overall for navigation, and I've tried a few. Waze is okay but has too much gimmicky stuff in it, and the routes it picks to save 7 seconds on your journey can be highly questionable.
One major advantage over Apple Maps is resolution in your car. Apple prioritized FPS by going for a lower resolution, but that reduces clarity and readability. Google Maps has a slightly lower frame rate, but full resolution.
The main issue at the moment with Google Maps is that Gemini is
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show me all the businesses matching the specific keywords I entered
Most users are not good at keyword prompting and that has been the driver of Google's products "knowing better" than the users for a long time.
within the specific area I searched.
Area based search is only context relevant after moving the map. This is also a pattern recognised by Google: People will search in general expecting results outside their area but often within a reasonable driving distance. If you actually move the map you get a context specific "search this area" button which doesn't zoom out. This isn't Google being unusable, this
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The problem with google maps:
a) it does not adjust fonts when you zoom in. How the fark am I supposed to read something, which has a font that is objectively to small to be read, then I zoom in, font gets bigger, I stop zooming, and the font jumps back to the original small size?
b) there is something interesting, like a "business", you zoom in or pan a bit, it vanishes. Now you have to figure how to find it again, but it is just HERE, but not shown!
The map scale is always missing.
The most important thing on
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Google Maps (2022)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-sued-negligence-maps-driver-died-collapsed-bridge-north-carolina-hickory/ [cbsnews.com]
This stuff can, sadly, happy with Google Maps too. It happened in the days of maps (remember the family that got stranded in a snowstorm in a national park taking roads they shouldn't have been able to?), the days of Garmins, and the days of cellphone mapping. I'm actually not aware of anyone dying from following Apple Maps misdirections, so perhaps it's a bit of blessing for Scott
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https://topclassactions.com/la... [topclassactions.com]
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
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https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/class-action-lawsuit-targets-flawed-apple-maps-app/
Dismissed. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/5:2013cv05332/272006/36/ [justia.com]
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/5:2013cv05332/272006/36/
Quotes from your link:
And consumer reports, after trying the new maps, found that, warts and all, they weren't too terrible:
Since the iPhone 5 release, and the Maps fracas, Apple shares lost about 4.5% of their value. That's about $30bn (£18.6bn) in market cap.
And Apple has never recovered!
Apple Maps wasn't good when it launched (and it was bad internationally). No consumers had to pay for Apple
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What really set Google Maps apart back then, and to this day gives them a big advantage, is the amount of information they were able to get from AI image analysis of satellite imagery and street view imagery.
For example, they are much better at getting you to the front door of a building, because they have seen where the front door is. Rivals often just get you physically next to the building, not at the entrance. It also means that there are far fewer errors with things like one way streets and no right tu
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I would have said that Google's Street View was a bigger deal than the satellite stuff, but it absolutely could have been both.
Apple had acquired several 3D mapping companies before launching Apple Maps, and "Flyover" mode with 3D models of buildings was, IIRC, one of the launch features. (Also IIRC) Flyover mode was limited to a handful of California and other mega U.S. cities.
I live in a mostly suburban location. To-the-front-door directions are pretty much irrelevant to me, so that's outside my realm of
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Google maps shows roads in my area that simply don't exist. They may have existed on paper at some point but were never built.
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I'm more inclined to believe the former case. I'm cur
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IME they just don't have street view for those "roads". There's the rub, somehow the street view scanning process where they drive right past those doesn't reveal that they aren't actually there. I mean where you can clearly see a fence across a place they think there's a road, they really ought to be able to fix that. But since most other companies aren't even doing as much verification as google is doing, it's hard to get super mad. The other maps all have the same misfeature.
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Google maps shows roads in my area that simply don't exist. They may have existed on paper at some point but were never built.
Sure, I've had the same experience first hand. But if you just google it :) you can see that people have the same complaint about Apple Maps, and every other map system as well including OSM.
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The best one you tell it to navigate to the airport, and it takes you right onto the runway.
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You think being told to make a hard turn off the side of a bridge, or being sent to a completely wrong destination is good?
Google maps also told me to do similar things. But rarely. The issue is how often that would happen.
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My experience is pretty much the same as yours. Where I live (not socal!), Apple Maps was fine. It wasn't great, but I never had a bad direction or anything like that (and even Google has those sometimes). I've switched to almost always using Apple Maps now, with Google Maps and Waze as backup.
I've filed a couple of updates (the same updates) to both Apple Maps and Google Maps and Apple implemented them within a month or two. Google never has, despite repeated attempts.
Re: Never got the hate (Score:1)
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I never got the hate for Apple Maps, even in the first year or two after release.
Way to go outing yourself as someone who lives locally to Cupertino. For anyone else who actually used it was fucking terrible. Me I live in a major city in a country the other side of the world. At least I thought I did, according to Apple Maps I lived literally 200km off the coast in the fucking Pacific Ocean.
Once they fixed that it suggested that rather than drive 10min down the highway to get to work I detour through a national park offroad trail for 2 hours (there was nothing wrong with the highway).
On
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Way to make assumptions. I lived in the US Midwest then; I have never lived in California much less the bay area.
Personally I haven't used a single mapping app, whether MapQuest, Garmin, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Open Street Map, or other that hasn't had some errors. There are how many mappable points and curves on the Earth? 1 trillion? 10 trillion? 100 trillion? No one has the
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I never got the hate for Apple Maps,
it's really not hard to hate an evil classist corporation that's cheating and stealing from all of us
now forgiveness for wrecking everything for everybody, that's hard
Re: Never got the hate (Score:2)
I didn't like that you couldn't download offline maps. You can now, but you couldn't for a long time.
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A map that does not show stuff around your current position, is a failure.
A map that you have scrolled to a certain place to look at, and when you switch app, and come back: reloads to current position, is a failure.
A map that you have scrolled to a certain place, and switch app, and you come back and have no internet, and it tries to reload and shows an empty page, instead of showing the map - which you have preloaded - and show you walking around on that map: because now you are just right there, is a fai
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But still, I wish both Google and Apple would spend some more time fixing and improving their maps. I should be able to choose route preferences like " Don't make any un protected left hand turns on to busy streets" and have it route accordingly. Google still routes people through really small alleyways sometimes to save a minute, or will route you on an e
Best map app? (Score:1)
Since it doesn't really work unless you already own an Apple phone, I can say that there is no way that this is the "best map app" for most of humanity. There are many mapping apps that work on any modern phone.
Huh, looks like Apple maps now works in a web browser. Not useful for a mobile device, but still far more functional than in the past.
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I have an iPhone, and I have tried using Apple Maps on multiple occasions - although admittedly not for a couple of years now.
I want to like it, because I do think its prompts and descriptions are better than Waze's / Google's, but it has consistently shown itself to be quirky and unreliable. For example - I was using it during a (~ 1 hour) commute from the Tacoma area to Seattle, and 75% of the way there it suddenly changed the route and told me I had 22 hours to go and now I needed to take a ferry (appare
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I have an iPhone, and I have tried using Apple Maps on multiple occasions - although admittedly not for a couple of years now.
I want to like it, because I do think its prompts and descriptions are better than Waze's / Google's, but it has consistently shown itself to be quirky and unreliable. For example - I was using it during a (~ 1 hour) commute from the Tacoma area to Seattle, and 75% of the way there it suddenly changed the route and told me I had 22 hours to go and now I needed to take a ferry (apparently I had to leave Seattle and then double back?). Or, when I tried it out going from my mom's house to my own (~ 30 minutes), it told me it was going to take 6 hours to get there - despite no significant traffic or construction between the two locations.
My parents had similar experiences. They were traveling to Fort Wayne from Indianapolis and, no matter how they prompted Apple Maps, it wanted to take them here [wikipedia.org] not here [wikipedia.org]. Worked out because their routes would always take them through the latter.
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Well at least it didn't try to take them here [wikipedia.org]...
First rule of QA (Score:3)
Never talk about fig....No, wait, that's management.
To do QA well is very very hard, but you have to absolutely hammer everything, test extremes, etc. If the QA people are playing it safe, it's because they're nervous that it's a really bad product. QA should haunt the dreams of developers and fill them with existential dread, to the point they don't make silly mistakes.
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Unfortunately most QA groups at Apple don't have real "stop release" power over the products. Program managers and upper management set the schedules and those dates must be hit for release no matter actual quality. There's inflection points before final release where truly buggy features get dropped or reduced in scope but rarely is there any time where QA has the power/time/resources to pause development for engineering to fix major issues.
The situation isn't helped by the OS being in so much flux for the
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Unfortunately most QA groups at Apple don't have real "stop release" power over the products. Program managers and upper management set the schedules and those dates must be hit for release no matter actual quality
That's certainly true for the OS, because the OS releases are tied to hardware releases. But features do sometimes get pulled. Apple Maps is a feature. So IMO, that's not a great argument for Apple Maps shipping in the state that it did.
Frankly, I'm of the opinion that the internal divide between iOS engineering (Forstall's fiefdom) and OS X engineering (everybody else) was probably a big part of why Maps didn't work as well as it should have initially (less internal testing). Forstall's departure tore
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But is that a mistake? Odds are severely against ever being held accountable for that because most Democrats want to collect bribes, too. Meanwhile it got him tariff exemptions that helped Apple, while the tariffs harmed the competitors. (Kind of reminds one of America and WWII... It's the American way!)
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But is that a mistake? Odds are severely against ever being held accountable for that because most Democrats want to collect bribes, too.
Yes, selling out your integrity and your values, and the values of your company, for lower tariffs is a mistake.
Apple is one of the most powerful companies in the world. And instead of using that power in a way that represents their values, they bent the knee to the king and got their reward.
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Yes, selling out your integrity and your values, and the values of your company, for lower tariffs is a mistake.
What integrity? What values? Apple only values money. That's why they constantly fuck over customers for it.
Apple is one of the most powerful companies in the world.
And as we have seen, that amounts to a hill of shit when they go up against a government determined to squeeze them, for good or ill reasons.
And instead of using that power in a way that represents their values, they bent the knee to the king and got their reward.
I cannot stress enough that the goal of Apple computer is to "ensure [q4cdn.com]
that the long-term interests of shareholders are being served". Anything else you might think is relevant simply is not. They did it to serve the shareholders. There will almost certainly be no n
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They did it to serve the shareholders. There will almost certainly be no negative consequences for the shareholders of bending the knee for more profit, as Trump would still have been shitting up America with or without Tim Apple's consent, and would probably have shit on Apple too if they hadn't bent over for him
Yes, the directors have an obligation to serve the shareholders but that does NOT mean that they have to do everything possible to produce the maximum amount of short-term profit possible, no matter what the consequences.
AND, even if that were the case, it could easily be argued that, as a global company, bending the knee to Trump - who is detested across most of the globe - could have negative profit consequences for the company. AND it could anger current employees who quit or protest in other ways, als
what Tim Cook should have done (Score:4, Interesting)
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Question, because I don't know the answer..
2012. Phones generally had around 32 GB of storage. How much space does a "couple hundred miles of map data" take up?
This may have not been practical in 2012, but I do not know.
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That depends on the street density, but it was very practical even in 2012. Maps generally use up a few hundred MB to a few GB. I've been using this feature as long as Google Maps has had it.
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All of the Netherlands (230miles by 160miles) takes up 1.3GB with today's dataset (which contains far more than OSM did in 2012). It's a very densely populated country.
You would have been able to do this in 2012. By the way Google introduced offline maps back in 2015 only a couple of years later.
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In 2012 your android would get filled up with a handful of apps and then you'd have to jailbreak it to force those apps onto a dead slow sd card.
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In 2012 the phone's eMMC was slower than a good SD card.
Wait, it's 2026 and that's still true.
Did you know that some SD cards have bad random read speeds? It's crazy, but it's true.
Re: what Tim Cook should have done (Score:2)
Same, always fine for me (Score:1)
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The issues weren't with usability – Apple Maps has always been decently usable. It's the poor quality of the data and navigation, even today, and the post-apocalyptic nature of their 3D imaging when it was first released: buildings were rendered as melted gooballs or bombed out structures. And their navigation and data quality still lags behind Google; just this past year, Apple Maps tried to take me on a pointless trip around a block on a straight-through path down a street. And I can't count the tim
It was the xserve discontinuance (Score:1)
And it stil isn't ready (Score:1)
It's still shit.
He's still lying though... (Score:1)
Re: He's still lying though... (Score:1)
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Didn't we see this forecasted in Firefly?
Re: He's still lying though... (Score:2)
"Now we've got the best map app on the planet" (Score:3)
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It Was (Score:2)
People who say "I really never really got the hate" are morons.
Apple Maps at release was a disaster. It was cartoonishly bad. I still don't use it because of that one time on a road trip it sent me into a rural hellhole to find a Chinese restaurant that never existed and could never exist in the hick shithole it sent me to.
I was literally afraid for my life just because some billion-dollar companies didn't want to play nice.
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So, for me, it was a "best effort" that wasn't good enough, but never rose to the level of h
What about AI? (Score:2)
AI was and is still crap. :P
Any Maps product is complicated (Score:1)
Don't let the door hit ya (Score:2)
As you said, have courage. When screwing people and taking away something they all want just tell them to have courage.
Launch your maps. Tell them to have courage and eat that product.... oh wait you could not do that with maps but with a phone there are not many competitors right? But you did on the phone? As a musician I will never forgive this one. I toy with modular synths and sample from my phone and absolutely hate having to keep a damn dongle to pass audio. The unwillingness to implement lossless BT
Map apps with no scale? (Score:2)
It irks me when I'm driving along and map app shows a red line for traffic ahead, or a gas station, or whatever, but I never know how far away it is or how long the back is. Because they never put a scale bar on the map. Is that traffic jam 1 mile long, 5 miles long? Who knows?
I'd love it if the map apps (be it google maps, waze, apple maps) would simply tell me how many miles or km the vertical extent is, top to bottom of the display == 1.5 miles or whatever. Just drop a few characters into the lower right