Apple’s CEO just apologized for the IOS6 Maps application and recommended that users download a different app from the App Store. If you want to know why, this site will give you a few examples.
I’m a pretty hardcore Google user so take this all with a grain of salt, but I don’t see a quick fix for Apple here. I had thought that they were using Open Street Maps, which is sort of Wikipedia for maps, but it turns out they licensed the street maps from TomTom, which makes GPS units. The satellite images come from some other vendor, the traffic from another, and transit maps from nobody.
Google has been doing maps since 2005. They have 7,000 employees working on maps. Six thousand of those are contractors, many of them collecting data for Streetview and overhead (aerial and satellite) maps. Some of them are correcting maps by hand after comparing them to photos. Google invented a standard for transit map data. They are inventing self-driving cars to get more Streetview data. In other words, they rolled their own, and the reason they did is that good maps are integral to their business, since they want to tie searches to the real world.
If you think I’m too much of a Google fanboi, let’s talk about Nokia. When Nokia wanted better maps on their phones, they paid $8.1 billion for Navteq. From what I’ve seen, Nokia’s smartphone mapping apps are very good.
Apple shows no such level of commitment to maps. Even though they are the Walt and Skyler Whites of corporate America — they have so much cash they will soon be stacking it in a storage locker and wondering how much is there — they haven’t spent that cash to buy or build a decent mapping solution. Maybe there’s some super-secret Google-scale mapping operation working from some deep underground lab in Cupertino, but if not, why the fuck can’t Tim Cook whip out his checkbook and buy TomTom? Instead, he’s writing weak-ass apology letters. Steve Jobs, who never fucking apologized for anything, must be spinning in his grave.
Update: I know that Jobs apologized for a number of screw ups. That last bit is hyperbole.
jibeaux
Here’s an even more basic question. I haven’t updated my iPhone with IOS6 and don’t plan to, since it currently uses google maps. I know they’re competitors, but maybe Apple could just continue to let their products use google maps. Why reinvent the wheel?
Elizabelle
Way to step on a ghost’s post, dude.
Violet
No kidding.
Zifnab25
@jibeaux: Because Apple wants more of that sweet sweet ad revenue and those damn Google bastards are robbing them blind!
Apple got greedy and made a stupid mistake, because it decided next quarter’s financial statement was more important than what people think of the iPhone two years down the line.
existenz
Actually Steve Jobs did apologize when he pissed off customers. I only searched for one example, I’m sure there are more:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/
dmsilev
@Zifnab25: Not quite that simple. Google, reasonably enough, kept a bunch of the shiny new features of their maps system exclusive to Android. Apple had the option of continuing to be a second-class citizen on Google Maps, or to go to the (very large) expense and trouble of rolling their own.
Since the reporting on the issue has said that the current contract between A & G runs until next summer, I think what they should have done is announce the new Maps as a beta, shipped both versions in iOS6 (probably inside the same app, with a big toggle switch to select the source), and then after 9 months of getting feedback from the entire planet, phase out the Google version as the contract expired. Unleashing a beta product and claiming it was finished was arrogance.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
The company I work for used to share a floor with Navteq. I swear they had a video camera trained on the men’s room door to monitor when I was entering the facilities and would send in a wave of Indian men to sidle up to the nearest urinal and stare at me awkwardly while I relieved my bladder.
Felinious Wench
I’m an Apple Fangirl, but man, they screwed the pooch on this one. Google Maps is excellent, why reinvent the wheel unless you’re offering some kind of competitive advantage with exceptional functionality?
I’ve upgraded the iPad to IOS6, but I don’t use it for maps. My iPhone has not been upgraded, and I don’t intend to because I use the map functionality on it a lot. And downloading another app to use is not the answer. Apple needs to be killing the new maps functionality and rolling back to Google.
Very, very stupid business decision.
tokyo ex-pat
I updated to OS6 not knowing about the maps issue, and yeah, it sucks. I live in Tokyo, not exactly a place known for street signs. Google maps is awesome, any way you cut it. I’d tell my son where I needed to go and he’d plug it in for me on the map. I am pissed that I’m stuck with this crappy substitute that will be lucky to get me where I want to go.
Does anyone have a recommendation for another map in the iTunes store like they say? I’m thinking I’ll have to try to pull up Google maps via Safari and access that way. Doable, but so much easier in an app.
I was smart enough not to update the iPad yet. At least Google maps is still on that.
Shawn in ShowMe
If Google is your number one competitor in the mobile space, then of course you want to keep their killer app off your device. But Google’s lead in geographic information systems is insurmountable at this point, for the reasons stated in the mix’s post.
Apple’s stuck. They have to bring back Google Maps, even if that strengthens the enemy. This isn’t something they can fix just by snazzing up the interface.
James K. Polk, Esq.
Apple, fucking their customers to increase their already massive bottom line?
In other news, the Space Pope is still reptilian.
joes527
@dmsilev: It is true that Google wasn’t going out of their way to make the iPhone experience deluxe. You know what would have fixed that? Money.
And yeah, I’m having a hard time crying about how things are just too expensive to history’s richest company.
Maps. Are. Hard.
This is not a fart app. If Apple wants to their platform to play, they are going to have to pay one way or the other. Trying to do it on the cheap is doomed to failure.
Maude
Why did Apple think getting rid of Google Maps was a good idea?
It’s like the NFL thinking replacement refs was just fine.
Felinious Wench
@dmsilev:
zadura
This is Apple’s DNA. Anybody who had the misfortune of using ClarisWorks knows what I mean.
Doug Danger
Your grasp of anything having to do with apple is as shallow as Mitts empathy.
NCSteve
@Zifnab25: Actually, it wasn’t really about the Benjamins. Negotiations with Google broke down over turn by turn and the amount of data Google can gather from the app. Google simply refused to let Apple use the turn by turn instruction feature available to users of Droid devices, which both sides realized was a major competitive advantage for Droid devices (and certainly one all the Droid device users I know glory in rubbing into my face) and Google wanted to be able to gather the same amount of data from the app on the iPhone that it does on the Droids and Apple didn’t want to let them.
If Apple screwed up, it was in not gaming out where it ends when a major vendor is also a competitor and starting work on its own mapping app years ago.
Felinious Wench
@joes527:
Amen, brother. I led a team that developed map software back in 2002 for oil companies. The complexity of all of the various factors to account for…shit is HARD, from somehow dealing with terabytes of data to user experience.
Which is why you don’t just throw something together and say “See? We have one too!”
Maude
@Doug Danger:
Whose grasp?
Doug Danger
Google doesn’t care squat for a map. Their mission is to “catalog the world’s information” with driverless cars, etc. it has nothing to do with people getting anywhere or doing anything.
Apple tends to take a task-based approach, which kills them in an information field as dense and varied as Maps. But let’s blame it on Steve not being there, which is what everyone else is saying. It’s wrong on its face, but why let that stop you?
Starfish
Google began acquiring companies that became part of Google Maps as early as 2004 so to say that they built their own is a little bit of a stretch.
Roger Moore
Because TomTom sucks ass. Apple needs to buy a good mapping company, and there aren’t any for sale. That means they’re going to have to try to build their own, and that’s going to take a while. The better question is why Apple threw this thing together at the last minute. They’ve known for years that Google Maps for Android is better than the version for iOS, and there’s never been any reason to think that Google was going to make it better for them. Why didn’t they start spending money on good maps the moment that became clear?
John_H
Its terrible that apple has to go on an apology tour.
Ronald ReaganSteve Jobs would never have made THIS mistake!James Hare
I’m beginning to feel like I’m crazy, but I yet to have a problem with the new Maps app. I’m beginning to like it better than my Garmin GPS navigation device because the POIs seem a bit more accurate. The first night Maps was out I used it to find a gas station. I’ve since used it almost every day at least once or twice. I have yet to find something missing or in the wrong place. I read criticism that Dulles Airport doesn’t show up. Siri found Dulles fine for me.
I remember when Google maps first came out — the results were often inaccurate and sometimes almost dangerous. My Garmin GPS was missing roads that had been completed for over a year on updated maps (finally with the 2013 the Intercounty Connector is completely represented — the 2012 maps didn’t have it and the road fully opened in November of 2011.
I’m not going to use the “maps are hard” excuse. I’m actually pleasantly surprised Apple’s new offering is as good as it is. I don’t understand all the bitching about inaccurate 3D models – that impacts your ability to use the maps how? I don’t understand how folks who were travelling all over the country made do with the old Maps application — turn by turn nav is far more useful driving in a strange city than a static list.
mistermix
@existenz: Yes, I know, that was a bit of hyperbole.
@Doug Danger: I’d really be in trouble if my post was as well-elucidated as your drive-by trolling.
Paul
What isn’t mentioned is that Google too is using TomTom data. The main difference is that they aren’t passing the corrections back to TomTom but keeping it in house. Apple is passing corrections onto TomTom which should improve their own data somewhat (and hence their nav systems).
Ironically, if you’re using Apple’s map app in China, its actually better than Google’s, which might help Apple more in the long term.
I’ve been using the Apple map app for a couple of weeks now, and I’m not getting the issues other people have, so it might not be a big a deal as its being made out to be (my wife’s phone is still using the OS 5 and the google map, so we’ve been comparing the results, just to be on the safe side).
The lack of public transportation options is a bit of a bummer though.
Walker
I would like to point out that, while I have bad-mouthed Android hardware in every post that mistermix has put up, I have always been vocally skeptical about Apple’s break from Google.
I am no longer skeptical. It is a complete an utter disaster.
Apple does not understand cloud tech. Their ignorance about cloud tech is so bad they they do not know enough to every hire quality cloud engineers. Essentially, a guy who screwed it up once. Took it from him, and hired someone outside. That guy screwed it up. They hired another guy and he screwed it up. Finally, they gave it back to the first guy who screwed it up the first go around.
Reading iCloud APIs are what you would get if your engineers were completely ignorant of the past 20 years of distributed systems research.
We have a strong cloud computing group here at my univerisity. Google, Facebook, et. al. are our talent faster than you can imagine. The only people I ever see Apple hire are HCI specialists.
And I say this as a total Apple fanboi.
Paul
And just for the record, Steve Jobs did apologize before, for the Mobileme screw up.
terraformer
Well, we just bought a home in a rural location at which Google maps (and all other maps I’ve tried) identifies as several miles away from where it actually is.
Then I fired up iOS 6 and Apple Maps found it precisely. Don’t know what happened, or why it found something the others couldn’t, but there it is.
Matt McIrvin
This is kind of amazing.
My wife has an iPhone, and the thing that struck me about it even before this disaster was that the Google Maps app on it was vastly inferior to the Android version, especially when it came to navigation. You can basically use an Android phone as a dashboard GPS if you have some way to mount it, and it works as well as or better than many dedicated GPS units, since it’s got the whole Google Maps backend behind it. That’s certainly not the case for the iPhone: while it was also Google Maps-backed, the navigation interface was primitive. I’d been impressed by the Maps app when the iPhone first came out, but they clearly hadn’t kept up.
And now this.
R-Jud
All I know is that Apple Maps has made me into an elite-level distance runner. Since the iOS6 update, MapMyRun frequently tells me I am running sub-four minute miles!
Sentient Puddle
@tokyo ex-pat: I grabbed Waze way back when I wanted turn by turn navigation, and am quite happy with that app. Don’t know if it does public transit or if you got any other considerations, but hey, it’s free.
Laertes
I use an iPhone, and I’m not upgrading to any version of iOS that lacks Google maps unless the phone absolutely will not work without it, at which point it’s time for a new phone.
Apple is out of their minds. This is the kind of thing that moves people off brands. When it’s new-phone time, and I’ve got a choice between a phone that does texts and voice calls and email and google maps and a phone that does texts and voice calls and email and no google maps, that’s a no-brainer.
This is going to hurt them bad. Google has a killer app here, and one that Apple just hasn’t made a credible attempt at replacing.
Walker
Sorry about the typo laden rant. Running to meeting.
jibeaux
@zadura: I had to use this abomination teaching school 15+ years ago. Damn near poisoned me on Macs forever.
Shawn in ShowMe
@NCSteve:
Apple is the king of user experience design, not the modern version of Bell Labs. They do what do. When they’ve gone outside their core competency, they’ve failed spectacularly.
Challenging the other big dude on the block to a martial arts battle when the other guy is a third degree black belt is a recipe for getting your ass beat.
mistermix
@Walker: I started wondering about their cloud effort when I heard that it was all going into one giant datacenter in NC. Interesting to hear another opinion.
I agree that most Android hardware is junk, btw, and the Android ecosystem is fragmented.
Peej01
I’m not a big user of the iPhone maps, so this issue doesn’t bother me at all. I figure it can’t be any worse than the maps my Prius uses which came from Toyota. It is totally confused by the layout of I-270 from Gaithersburg to the Beltway.
mistermix
@terraformer: There’s a “Report a Problem” link at the lower left of the web-based Google Maps page. It would be a interesting to submit your location and see how long it takes to get fixed.
Lojasmo
@Matt McIrvin:
I just navigated a completely unknown rural route on ios6 and it worked perfectly.
Cassidy
@Doug Danger: Did the Google maps app fuck your sister or something?
So, quick question as I was planning on doing the update tonight: I hate turn by turn. I prefer the top down, follow my blue dot version of google maps. Do I still get that feature with the update?
MikeJ
@R-Jud: Are you saying Paul Ryan uses an iPhone?
scav
It might help to separate out two components of the problem. There’s the underlying data (which is a hairball) and the software that uses the data (turn-by-turn, location-based-tweets, etc. etc.). I think Apple probably severely underestimated the sheer hairballness of the first problem while focusing on its contre-temps with Goog on the second issue. Maintaining a global-scale database of streets, postal-codes, poi, satellite imagery etc. is insane even if you know how to do it, and Apple essentially tried to gerryrig one together in an inadequate time-frame. In any case, the scale of maintaining the database may always mean it’s useful to have access to multiple mapping software, but more importantly, underlying databases. Because of update schedules, there are likely always to be minor variations as to which is better in certain areas (when they add new streets data), beyond the wild variations in quality that Apple is currently experiencing (and can fix, if they throw enough qualified eyeballs and geeks on it, datageeks & cartographers/GIS types)
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@James Hare:
Me too. Used it yesterday to re-route during my home commute when a bridge was down for construction: I knew other ways home, but was curious about how Maps would behave. Worked fine.
That said, I never used Google Maps, not even when I had Android phones. Sprint puts TeleNav on its other phones, so I was just used to that app, and downloaded it from the App Store when I got my iPhone.
Problem is, TeleNav mysteriously stopped working 2-3 weeks ago. So I guess I’ll have to live with Maps for awhile.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Apple needs to man up and just get Google Maps for iOS6. I tried Apple Maps for the first time yesterday. I entered the nation of Djibouti (in Africa). The pin landed in Ethiopia. At least they got the continent right.
PeakVT
I just lurve Gmaps. I think I spend more time using it than I do searching for cat macros.
Roger Moore
@mistermix:
Or, if you want to see the positive side, Android allows low-cost devices and is more open to innovation. I’ll agree that Apple (usually) concentrates on high quality devices and a consistent user experience. The drawback of that is that concentrates on the high end of the market and results in a severe NIH syndrome.
Djur
@NCSteve: “Android”
@mistermix: Android is catching up, though. I’ve been using a Galaxy Nexus for a while and (especially since Jelly Bean) it’s the first time I’ve felt an Android device was pretty much comprehensively better than the iOS devices I’ve used. (That is, the performance issues finally stopped outweighing the good stuff.)
terraformer
@mistermix: Just did it. Let’s see how quickly those thousands of Google minions can fix it!
scav
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: See datarant above. There are areas where their data will be fine. There will be areas where it’s insane. Both statements are true. For a while, it might be good to double-check any routes in unknown areas until you’re comfortable that you’re in one of Apples safe zones. They may also be integration problems between times of data, street centerlines good (thus routing fine), pois wildly off (depending on where and how they geocoded the pois).
Shawn in ShowMe
@scav:
I think you’re overestimating the number of qualified GIS types who exist. It’s not exactly a sexy field that attracts swarms of IT geeks.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Laertes: This is basically where I’m at. I like and rely upon a few iOS programs, but if Apple doesn’t fix this, well, that’ll be what my iPod touch is for. I need my phone to be a decent nav device; if it’s not, I might as well go back to the old flip phone.
But I won’t have to, because the Android phones are out there, and at the moment they have both better connection speeds AND a better nav app. So when the ol’ iPhone 4 dies, I suspect the replacement will not be another Apple product. Too bad. They had something good going for a while.
blingee
I love Apple. I love selling/shorting Apple stock that is.
Anyone who thinks Apple stock will continue on its metoric rise now that Jobs is gone hasn’t learned from history.
mechwarrior online
apple has NEVER done anything very well and NEVER made a high end product. Why are people shocked? Apple is all glitz and glam priced high enough it becomes a lifestyle statement.
I mean oh well, but the iphone wasn’t that good of a phone to start with. And the point of having an apple product was never what you did with it, it was owning it, the logo, and moving a step up the socio economic ladder.
Walker
@Roger Moore:
Apple’s problem is that they still have a very anti-academic corporate culture (no research partnerships) that is a hold over from teh Steve. This worked for them for a long time, because they were focused on the consumer rather than the tech. But it is crippling them now because the tech is passing them by.
iLarynx
“Hyperbole” is abbreviated “BS.”
Apple dropped the ball on this one, no doubt. But it’s hardly a “mapocolypse” that it’s being portrayed. And it’s definitely a YMMV issue to a great extent. Dijibouti pin misplaced? I’m sure 99.9998% of the world’s population puts that in the “BFD” column.
In my book, Google Maps is just the best at this point in time. I’ve always preferred it to MapQuest and use Google Maps to this day, but it’s not perfect. I had Google maps misdirect me 20min off course just this past spring on the way to a soccer game. Others there had the same problem so it wasn’t just me. Google’s pins get dropped on the wrong side of the street or a few address off on occasion as well (not really a big deal). And take a look at what Google Maps was putting out just last year:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1369224/Meltdown-Google-Earth-New-3D-function-goes-awry-bridges-flop-like-Salvador-Dali-paintings.html
Best advice: DON’T PANIC!
scav
@Shawn in ShowMe: probably, cause I iz one. But there seem to be enough of us to manage to get Google and Navtec and Tomtom ESRI and Rand McNally et al and help with Opensoure and other ground-up mapping so Apple with all it’s cash should be able to poach a few if they commit to the data and not the interface.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Shawn in ShowMe: I’ve been working in IT for about 15 years. I know two GIS people. Two. Period. And they’re not leaving their jobs; they’ve both been through the software company bullshit grind, but now they’re state employees and they make decent enough money – way less than they did in the private sector – but more importantly they are now in a union and get a pension. They’ll never go back.
joes527
@Shawn in ShowMe:
Are you f’n KIDDING me? The babes love dudes who know their Datums.
Shawn in ShowMe
@scav:
We are talking about Apple, right? That’s like asking Michael Bay to focus on robotics theory, not on CGI.
Felinious Wench
@mechwarrior online:
Are you in tech? Which devices/OS do you prefer?
Felinious Wench
@scav:
Bingo.
scav
@Shawn in ShowMe: well, yeah, it was a train-wreck I saw coming (my mother worked with folk from Apple for years, counter-balenced by my sister being an fanboi). But, this might be a big enough oops that they have to adjust. There are a lot of Location-based aps taking off so they have to have edge out of their comfort zone.
me
@Paul: Nope. Google dropped Tele-Atlas (later purchased by TomTom) like a bad habit when it became clear just how shitty their data despite being one year into a five year contract. Google does their mapping completely internally.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@blingee: Coming from you, who has a sterling history of being 100% wrong about everything you’ve ever posted here under your eight different names, makes me want to run out and buy a ton of the stock.
However, in this particular case, stopped clock and all that, you’re dead on right. Apple’s future is going to look a lot like Microsoft’s recent past – sitting on a mountain of money, the company won’t be going out of business in this decade or the next, but they’re now pretty irrelevant. And the same thing will happen to Apple.
mistermix
@iLarynx: Well, I have a confession to make. I tried to use IOS 6 maps to navigate to Steve Jobs’ grave to determine if he was, in fact, spinning in it, however, turn-by-turn sent me to a deserted sex toy distributor’s warehouse in South San Fran so I couldn’t verify that, either. So there may be two pieces of hypberbole in that last sentence. All apologies.
? Martin
There isn’t a quick fix. It’s going to take 1-3 years to catch up to Google.
But I think a lot of this is really blown out of proportion. I’ve been reporting mistakes on Apple maps for the places I go regularly, and I’ve been using Google maps to confirm that what I’m submitting is correct. Turns out, Google maps has the same mistakes about 80% of the time. Of the missing businesses, Google is missing also about 80% of those. The mistakes actually are in Yelps database or Foursquares and so on and both maps are suffering from it.
I haven’t found any situations where something was missing in Google but present in Apple maps. A few people have, but I think that’s really rare, but I think the problem breaks down as follows:
1) For about 75% of users, both maps work well enough. They both succeed and both fail similarly. I fall in this camp. Apple maps hasn’t failed to find what I need or direct me in the right place. I can see that Google’s maps are more complete, but so far I haven’t needed that additional information to solve whatever problem I’m having. Would I like that added data? Sure, but it’s not worth even switching over to another map app to get it, let alone switch to another phone platform.
2) For about 20% of users, they’ve internalized Google’s failings and can no longer see them. The bakery they frequent has been in the wrong spot for 5 years and it no longer bugs them and they function just fine in spite of it. And the added features like street view are things that while they may not need, they’ve come to take as a security feature “If I get really lost I can just…” and they feel insecure without it, even if they don’t actually ever use it. These are the users that are completely unsettled without Google’s data and really want a Google Map iPhone app now.
3) For about 5% of users – they just full-on rely on Google maps features that don’t exist in Apple maps, and may not for a while. Stuff like bike directions and some of the transit features (though, those will fill in quickly on iOS – and possibly more accurately, if my commuter friend observations are accurate because the transit information is being added directly from the transit operators, where Google serves as a middleman and tends to be slower with updates in some cases)
Unfortunately, this was inevitable for Apple. Google doesn’t offer up most of those Android map features through their APIs, so there’s no way to even add vector maps (which reduce mobile bandwidth, possibly saving you money, and always saving you time). And Google has recently started charging relatively big money to access their data ($2.50 per 1000 map loads – or somewhere in the small billions annually for a company like Apple). Almost everyone has consequently switched out of Google – Yelp uses OpenStreetMaps. Amazon has gone with Nokia. Craigslist has gone with OpenStreetMaps, etc.
From people I know, the problem for Apple was twofold:
1) So long as they stuck with Google maps and so long as Google wasn’t willing to allow feature parity with their data across platforms, Apple customers would always be getting a 2nd rate experience. That’s well within Google’s rights to do, but it’s a new move for them. They were always about the data, and now they aren’t. Now they’re about the platform. Android Google map data is simply better than anyone else’s Google map data. It changes how companies interact with them in pretty profound ways. This is just the first example. More will come.
2) Google was willing to extend the agreement with the old data if Apple allowed Google to harvest user information. Apple doesn’t allow that for anyone through Apple’s infrastructure (in the old maps, your data stopped with Apple – nothing got returned to Google). If you want that, you can put your own app in the store and collect it, but Apple’s not going to lose user trust by serving as a proxy for Google or magazine publishers or ad agencies or so on – particularly in a preloaded feature. So far, that’s been a deal breaker for Apple, and it was a deal breaker for Google in this round.
This isn’t about money, it’s about control. It’s about not turning over control of user data to a 3rd party – which Apple is wise to do. Any fuckups are Apple fuckups and they won’t get screwed over like any number of other companies. Anyone remember when Sidekick users got locked out of their own phones, and their data ultimately destroyed when Microsoft fucked something up? Yeah, well, Apple does. How about any of the gazillion security breaches that have leaked user data of one form or another? Apple isn’t arguing that they’re necessarily better than anyone else at this, just that good or bad, the buck stops with them. And that’s not new – been that way for 15 years. And it’s also about Apple being able to control what can be done with maps. Apple can expose new features through their API to other apps, that Google wouldn’t permit. This is the same issue that led Apple to eventually block Flash (they were initially open to the idea until Adobe spent months demonstrating that they couldn’t get it to work well on mobile devices, then Apple went full-bore in opposition to it. What if Apple had marketed on that feature and Adobe failed to deliver? Who would be to blame? Apple, and rightly so.) These are also the reasons why both Apple and Google backed out of the YouTube deal. Google wanted to push ads to users and collect user data, and Apple didn’t want either. So, Google has their own YouTube app now to do that, and Apple’s fine with that.
blingee
@mechwarrior online: If you say so. Personally I have always viewed iTards as technically inept people who needed a product that made them feel like they knew more than they actually did.
tBone
@dmsilev:
That’s the best idea I’ve heard for how Apple should have handled this. I think their biggest problem isn’t the quality (or lack thereof) of the new maps – those will get better, and relatively quickly. The real problem stems from their complete failing to properly set expectations.
It was impossible for Apple to come right out of the gate with a feature-complete world-wide mapping solution as good as Google Maps; it’s an enormously complex undertaking and you often don’t know where the holes are until the great unwashed masses start using the product.
But Apple chose to act like the new app would be not just on-par with the old one, but an improvement. Bad choice, there. They should have framed it as “we’re building the best mobile mapping app in the world, but we need your help to do it.”
Aside: personally, I like the new app. I don’t use transit directions, so basically the only thing I ever used the old app for was very basic searches. The dataset for my area is fine in the new app, so having baked-in turn-by-turn is really nice, and they did a fantastic job with the UI.
blingee
@Forum Transmitted Disease: How about some examples about how wrong I have been! Another projectionist?!
Wrong about Libya? Wrong about the stock market? Wrong about Obama kicking ass by the time Sept rolls around? Wrong about Cole being a fucking moron for taking the opposing view of all those things? What have I been wrong about exactly?
Shawn in ShowMe
@? Martin:
So what, Apple is going to hire twice as many GIS experts as Google? Where are all these people supposed to come from?
? Martin
I think the mistake people are falling into with the solution to this problem is that the problems aren’t technical ones. Apple’s in quite strong shape on that. The technical side of maps isn’t really all that complicated, anyway. It’s fairly straightforward, in fact.
The problem is that this data is HUGE and really fucking messy. You pull it from dozens of different sources that all have their own way of encoding it. You need to normalize all of that and if there are 5 sources that indicate the location of Taco Bell, you have to pick one. Which one? They’re all likely to be different. Some of those 5 sources may be pulling from other of the 5 sources, and if one is wrong, well…
In the end the only solution for Apple (and Google) is to take every scrap of data that comes through and validate it within their own systems. You can use algorithms and statistics to do some validation, but in the end, it’s mostly going to come down to some human looking at the map and seeing if that Taco Bell pin is sitting on the right building, and then checking a little box that says ‘validated’. And then the system will reject any new location data for that Taco Bell. In the end, this is a brute force effort. You don’t need an army of cartographers with PhDs and GIS guys (you need some, but Apple already has them), you need an army of guys that have enough cartography knowledge to stare at hundreds of thousands of reported anomalies and go in and fix them one by one by hand. There’s a reason why Google’s mapping team is in Bangalore and not Mountain View – it’s purely a labor effort. Apple doesn’t have this team yet – or at least, they don’t have it in the scale it needs to be. And as I noted above, for all the good that Google has done, they’re still wildly off with a lot of their POI data. I’m in the middle of up-salary Orange County in the tech hub, not a mile from a large Google building, and fully half of the retail locations in my area are missing, and half of those present are in the wrong location. We’re elbow to elbow with geeks that are likely to report these mistakes, and a ton of it is still wrong. It’s really, really, really fucking hard to map the planet down to the building level.
zzyzx
It looks like Apple maps work just fine in the US but are really sketchy in the UK.
iLarynx
@Felinious Wench:
Did you miss it? Mechwarrior Online was shown some time ago to be the alias of Steve Ballmer. What else would explain the irrational anti-Apple screeds devoid of any tech knowledge post 1995?
? Martin
@tBone:
Exactly this. Hell, even Google still calls their maps a beta after 7 years. This more than anything else is what Apple screwed up – particularly as they’re relying on 3rd parties to provide the transit data, and that was going to take some number of weeks/months to get filled in.
It’s also worth noting that Apple’s maps are much better than Googles in some parts of the world. If you have a device inside China, the maps of China served up there are apparently fantastic. Transit data in Paris and Germany is supposedly already much better. Maps in Korea are supposedly very good. It really depends a great deal on who Apple is contracting with and who Google is contracting with. The US is one of the weaker markets, mainly because Google has really put a lot of focus here and put a lot of their own resources into getting the US right.
vayama
One does not become the Walt & Skyler White of mobile computing without shooting a few Gale Boettichers in the face.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@blingee: I don’t have the time, that list is just too long, and let’s face it: I have zero interest in stopping you from stomping on your own dick.
But I do feel obligated to say this much: You’re a pissy, mean little fucker. Maybe if you stopped being such a total dick 100% of the time, people would be nicer to you and you’d stop getting kickbanned every two months.
Might even help out in real life, but I have my doubts, if your online social skills are any reflection of your real life ones – and that’s usually the case. You seem too far gone.
We’ll talk again when you have yet another screen name.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@iLarynx: Probably. But since I work there part of the year, it’s kind of a BFD to me. Google’s got the city mapped well. Apple doesn’t even realize it’s a country, much less that it has roads. Bit of a problem. At least for me.
stormhit
@terraformer:
I’ve reported a few things and in three years none of it’s been fixed.
iLarynx
@mistermix:
Apple Maps IS accurate then. The ashes of Steve Jobs are being combined with a new highest-tech aluminum and glass vibrator to be made into Billions of sex toys to be given away to every female so that by 12/21/12 Steve Jobs will be making techno-orgasmic love to all the women in the world, even in death. You just happened to be directed to one of the nearby distribution centers.
The real secret of Apple is that ALL of Steve Jobs’ life-long efforts were directed towards this one, final goal.
One hell of an epitaph, don’t you think?
stormhit
@iLarynx:
Kind of a silly take. Love it or hate it, Windows 8 is a huge gamble based on the notion of a large transition in computing that hasn’t even really occurred yet. That alone kind of destroys the whole “Microsoft is stuck in the past” meme.
ice weasel
There’s more than enough hyperbole on tech issues already. As a reader, I don’t need more from you.
You completely ignored or, because it didn’t help make your hyperbole more entertaining, the whole issue of the length of the agreement between Apple and Google and what that meant to both companies strategically. You took the standard Gizmodo low road and just popped off like some smart ass meeting a ten minute deadline.
Oh, and by the way, why didn’t Apple buy TomTom? Well, it probably doesn’t make much sense as developing their own data, regardless of what you speculate Apple’s effort might be. “Converting” data is really a big part of the problem here and, I’m guessing, Apple knows this and is working on it.
Make no mistake, this is a big, steaming pile of shit for Apple to eat. They have and they will.
But it doesn’t take much of a memory to recall what Google maps (or Mapquest) was like back in the beginning and frankly, aside from Apple’s stupid mistake and hyping the app like they did, it’s reasonable to give them some time to get this app working. Apple should never have set the expectations where they did and now Apple is paying for that mistake, publicly.
We can argue all you want on whether or not companies should deploy Betas but that’s not the silly issue you bring up here.
I love Balloon Juice. I’ve been a many times a day reader here for more than a year now but blogging like this is a waste of electrons and a waste of my time. You should work to a higher standard. Just because this isn’t political reporting doesn’t mean you get to just blather for six paragraphs, end with an idiotic and inaccurate joke and then add in an update. Sorry, that’s just my opinion.
? Martin
@blingee: Maybe if you spent less time insulting them, you’d get to know them a bit better. Most of the most ardent iPhone users I know are hardware and software engineers that have enough geekery in their 5/40 (hah!) lives that they don’t want any more jiggery/pokery in their off time. Personally, I do enough coding and systems configuration in my job, I don’t want my wife and kids bugging me with support questions all the time – it makes me cranky after a long day.
It’s one of those don’t turn your hobby into your job kinds of things.
According to my wife, all of her friends on other platforms are pushing their husbands quite hard for iPhones because they don’t want to be reliant on someone else to figure out how to do things – they want to be independent. I think the newer Android versions are much better on that front, but their experience is with 2.3 and earlier and that’s soured them on the platform.
scav
@? Martin: Yup.
You don’t need twice as many GIS types to deal with the issue, you need a core to handle the technical stuff (dealing with datums, registration, blah blah blah, that are always cropping up) and to help set up workflows for handling QC. There are other IT geeks needed here too for the volume of data – it’s not entirely a pure GIS problem. There are some geographical tricks you can use to help triage QC, and geographically regular patterns of error, disappears into weeds abort. Some carto-types to help with symbolization (using the same symbol for RR stations and metro-stops is one problem I’ve heard of in a few places) — minor issue. Mostly what you need are workflows and people juggling those firehoses of data. I think Navteq’s using a dispersed form of QA, more like organized micro-hires of locals to ground truth data because you can’t do that sort of stuff on-line. The latter might only reproduces existing errors, ground-truthing is better (NB: Apple should have the pre-existing crew for that, as did Google — people don’t immediately think to send errors to NavTeq or TeleAtlas).
vheidi
Apple maps told my husband he was on 44th & Madison when he was on 42nd & 5th- can’t even get nyc right?
Happy droid user.
? Martin
@Forum Transmitted Disease: And that’s a really valid issue.
If something is 90% complete, that doesn’t mean it’s 90% complete to everyone. It could be 0% complete for some people and 100% complete for others. We draw really bad statistical conclusions when we don’t recognize that.
We’re also arguing Apple’s case from a very US-centric view. That’s not entirely unjustified given how large a market the US is, and international travel is hardly foreign to us. But Apple’s 2nd most important market is China, and according to people in China, Apple’s maps are far and away better than Google’s because Apple licensed the best dataset in the country (but you have to hit the maps from a China IP to see that particular dataset, you get a different dataset if you look from outside China). It seems to be a really mixed bag how strong or weak Apple maps are based on all of that. It’s even possible when you get to Djibouti you will get different data because the company that offers that data to Apple only licensed it for use in that country or that region.
When I say this is a mess, it’s seriously a mess – and not just for Apple but for everyone. Google has similar issues with serving up different data based on where you are loading it from.
The Lodger
@mistermix: Google Maps labeled I-84 in Oregon as “Quebec Route 366” and didn’t fix it until about 2 months after I reported the error.
Origuy
I reported a problem to Google a couple of years ago. I was planning to stay in North Vancouver and wanted to see how long it would take to walk to Stanley Park, across the Lions Gate Bridge. I knew there was a walkway, but Google didn’t. It tried to route me through a ferry. I reported the problem, got a “Thanks, we’ll check it out” response within a week. A few months later, I got another email that said they had checked it out and fixed it. That’s about the level of response I expected; an urgent safety problem should have gotten higher priority but this wasn’t.
? Martin
@stormhit:
It is a huge gamble, and there are many aspects of the effort that are admirable, in spite of how it’s being received by users and developers (they’ll mostly get over it). I think where Microsoft truly is stuck in the past is their business model. They don’t yet know how to break out of the commodity platform model, and they need to. Google is discovering the same thing. MS has no hardware partners even remotely capable of competing with Apple – hell, most are barely profitable, and the largest, seeming most capable ones aren’t profitable at all. Google isn’t in the same boat yet, but they’re on the same track. Samsung is quickly looking like the sole competitor in the space, with everyone else falling victim to $100 Chinese Android devices that are cheap, but not competitive with Apple or Samsung. If Samsung gets a lock on the not-shit Android space, then Google’s advantage really dries up and the platform increasingly becomes Samsungs, not Googles.
These are almost inevitable outcomes when one strong party (Apple) refuses to play by the commodity rules. It only worked for Microsoft for all those years because there was no strong competitor – the Windows situation was something of an anomaly in history, and it’s going to be almost impossible to repeat short of Apple really fucking up here.
mistermix
@ice weasel:
Gosh, I owe yet another apology. I should have realized that the proper response to the CEO of Apple telling his customers to run a different Maps app than the one that was hyped at the IOS 6 announcement was to examine the details of the Apple / Google agreement. My mistake, obviously. If only Apple pushed out an update to Maps that said “Hey, we know this sucks, but if you understood the subtleties of the contractual relationship between Google and Apple, you’d understand that we just can’t send you correct turn-by-turn to get to Grandma’s house in Boca Raton.”
In case it’s not clear, the contractual relationship between Apple and Google might be an interesting topic to some (not me), but it has no fucking bearing on the fact that Apple just shipped a crap product and they are going to take years to fix it.
But, if you’re interested in that topic, Martin, up thread, nailed it: they should have put this out as a beta and left Google maps on IOS 6 for another year. If they had, this would have been a non-event.
Yeah, the reason for not buying TomTom, which already has a giant database that could be the basis for Maps, as well as a team of veteran GIS engineers, is that it makes more sense to start over from scratch when you’re already years behind.
ericblair
@scav:
This sounds like a prime opportunity for crowdsourcing. If there’s one thing any schlub user knows, it’s his own backyard and that the 7-11 is not in the same building as the fire station. You’ve got your typical griefer/moron issues, but can set a certain number of responses before a location is considered validated (and may set a validation lifetime to prevent stale data).
However, Apple don’t play that game. Of course there’s error feedback to the mappers, but it’s awkward and seems that most of the time it ends up in the bit bucket. Is there anybody thinking of a “This is Wrong” button or a “We Need Your Validation Here” button?
Maude
@mistermix:
The problem Apple has is that it released the device and now Cook is saying sorry about the unusable maps program. Fail.
Apple prides itself on easy use for customers. Fail.
Apple products are expensive. They have a problem with their reputation now.
? Martin
@scav: I don’t know enough of how Apple is managing the data layers. I suspect that they’re taking regular feeds from all of these sources, correcting it locally, but not pushing it back upstream. If so, that’s a bit disappointing. I think they could make faster progress by dumping some money on OpenStreetMap, pushing their corrections back upstream to them, and encouraging users to make edits directly in that dataset. That’d turn users into workers in the near term. They could always change that later, once the dataset is sufficiently cleaned up (Google seems to be taking a similar approach in their data). Apple could also create an interface to make it trivial to check in via Yelp or Foursquare in exchange for getting that statistical geo data back. That’d allow them to at least statistically correlate what was accurate and what wasn’t and allow them to focus on the biggest errors first.
At a minimum, it seems as though Apple isn’t taking data updates fast enough – as I’m seeing corrections being made in OSM that don’t carry forward to Apple’s. Same with Yelp, etc. Those are the kinds of things they can fix fairly quickly, though.
Google was smart about the ground truth by using street view both as a feature and as a remote way for their data guys to validate. That’s not something Apple can easily directly replicate – however, Apple can pay for their validation guys to load up the Google street view maps and use those for validation. I don’t think there’d be any IP issues there, provided that there’s no direct data exchange. Google may not like it, but they’d be getting their $2.50…
tBone
@mistermix:
Since Apple is using TomTom’s giant database as a basis for Maps (at least in North America), and they’ve purchased several other mapping companies since 2009, I don’t really understand your criticism here. There’s no magical turnkey solution that Apple could purchase and drop in as a new backend; they had to more or less start from scratch, just like Google did.
@? Martin:
I wouldn’t even consider the US one of the “weaker” markets – the data here is pretty good overall, particularly for big metro areas. For routing, I haven’t found much difference between the new app and Google Maps. (Obviously if you rely a lot on Streetview or transit you may feel differently.)
mistermix
@tBone: I don’t think TomTom would be a drop in replacement, and I recognize that TomTom’s maps are part of the problem with Apple maps. But buying an established player with mapping resources makes sense if you’re playing catch up. As I mentioned in the post, Nokia had some success doing that with Navteq.
Amanda in the South Bay
@? Martin:
Because tablets like the Asus Transformer don’t exist in your world? I know you are the biggest Apple supporter on here, but you have a tendency of putting down everything not Apple. And you know, MSFT is releasing their own Surface tablets made by them, so its a little premature to write them off in that regards. Also, well, I guess you think that every MBP/MBA is better than any Ultrabook/ThinkPad/high end business PC?
Amanda in the South Bay
@mistermix:
I think there’s also (and I realize your comment was sarcastic) the perpetual Silicon Valley tendency to reinvent the wheel.
Anyways, upgrading to iOS 6 wasn’t going to happen for me, as I rely on public transit every single day, and not having that is obviously a deal breaker (and no, downloading separate apps isn’t the same experience as having it integrated).
? Martin
@mistermix: Apple already has benefit of TomTom data via license. Owning TomTom only buys them the workforce that is going to keep TomTom up to date. It doesn’t buy them anything else, and Apple is going to need that workforce either way, and I’m pretty sure TomTom is relying on other data sets like Yelp for POI information anyway, which Apple is already getting via different license. If Apple had no other way to build their mapping team out, buying TomTom would make sense, but if they feel they can build it out through normal methods, then buying TomTom is just an expensive and somewhat unpredictable way to hire. It’s unpredictable because you have somewhat greater certainty that regular hires are going to stay with the company – that’s not so certain with acquisitions.
If Apple wants the best US address datasets, they need to talk to UPS and Fedex. Those guys have the best address-level maps by far (much better than Googles) and they have quite good (if differently focused) POI data as well. But those are seriously strategic assets to those companies, and Apple would pay dearly for them, if they’re even for sale.
The main underlying problem here in the US, I think, is that the US government should have an address level dataset standard maintained by USPS and USGS. There’s the USGS standard, but it doesn’t get the Congressional love it deserves, and if you want an address accurate GPS dataset, USPS should be the agency maintaining that and offering it to all comers. It’s not like they don’t already do it in analog space. Congress could even open that up as a funding source for the USPS.
iLarynx
@mistermix:
“the fact that Apple just shipped a crap product”
Crap product? A few months ago Google put me (and several others) 20 minutes in the wrong direction on the way to get to an appointment. Google a crap product? I won’t set my hair on fire to come to that conclusion. Flawed, yes. Crap, no. I have a modicum of understanding regarding the technical aspects of mapping programs. It’s complex and NO MAPPING PRODUCT WILL NEVER BE PERFECT. Google IS the best right now BUT it is IMprecise as often as it is accurate from my experience. The level of Google’s imprecision is usually minimal but sometimes, it’s way, way off. As recently as May 2012, it put me and several other individuals using Google Maps on the wrong course by several miles. This, in an established area with no road changes in years. I suspect that Apple’s iOS Maps work well enough for 95% of the people 95% of the time, just as Google’s maps work well enough to get 98% of the people close enough to their destination 98% of the time. HOWEVER, Apple has conditioned their users to expect (near) 100% perfection. Apple Maps falls way to short of that number. Thus, Apple Fail on this one.
The most level-headed commentary on this issue was posted by Jean-Louis Gassée. It’s worth a read: http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/09/23/apple-maps/
? Martin
@ericblair:
Actually they do. There is a quite good feedback tool to correct mistakes in the Apple maps app. There are mixed benefits to crowdsourcing feedback (which they are doing) vs crowdsourcing corrections (which they are not). The latter may be faster assuming the community fixes problems faster than they make them. Wikipedia is a good example of how hard it is to get that balance right.
Further, Apple is getting statistical feedback through other sources like Siri and the mapping app itself.
PeakVT
Here’s an example of how much effort Google has put into GMaps. Look at the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Notice the faint lines? Google has apparently gotten hold of the hi-resolution seafloor data used for undersea cable-laying. The map team is downright obsessive.
owlbear1
Apple thinks that much of the east side of Portland, Oregon is a nature park
Wouldn’t take much.
mistermix
@? Martin: My neighbor was involved with the roll out of the latest/greatest UPS delivery tracking system a couple of years back. In our area, it took them 6 months of correcting the database to get it to a usable form. So maybe that process is finished and the database is perfect, or perhaps it sucks anywhere it isn’t rolled out. Dunno, but I agree that they’re not going to sell it.
Acquisitions are always tough and people are hard to keep, but do you really think that Apple has TomTom’s full attention and best effort via a license? I would imagine that TomTom saves the best for its own devices and is very leery of dealing with Apple in general simply because smartphones in general are the death of TomTom’s business model.
Also, too, on your comment about Samsung: you forgot one giant Android smartphone mfr that has deep pockets, Motorola. Their last announcement was just a refresh of their last year’s models. We still haven’t seen what they really can do when they’re teamed with Google. And they’re not going out of business anytime soon.
iLarynx
@iLarynx:
Pardon the previous typos.
NO MAPPING PRODUCT WILL EVER BE PERFECT
and “too” not “to.”
Time to go home. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
scav
@iLarynx: Recalculating Route. Heuristically, I would suggest searching for a place with a pillow with your DNA on it. Works for most people, most of time. Take local roads.
PeakVT
@PeakVT: Actually, there’s more of it than I realized. A lot seems to be along the paths where cables would go, but there’s also traces in the South Pacific where there are no islands for thousands of miles. Anyway, it’s obsessive.
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
Which would work great except that the wingnuts in Congress are doing their very best to kill USPS, e.g. by requiring them to prefund all their pensions and healthcare for no good reason. Nothing like that is going to come from our government as long as any part of the government is controlled by people who want to prove that government is worthless.
blingee
@Forum Transmitted Disease: You don’t have to time to find one single thing I have been wrong about? Surely you can think of one in the same amount of time it took you to spew forth one of your projections stating you had a whole list.
J R in WV
@Shawn in ShowMe:
I worked in a software development unit beside a GIS shop. They had great staff, but many of them stayed just long enough to get professional experience, and then went for bigger bucks. People who get geographic data, really get it. We were hiring PhDs for that shop, out of Illinois and such. Chinese, Pakistani, etc, but very professional.
? Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay:
I know they are, and they look quite nice. But it also looks like a half-assed effort. From the design perspective, they look fantastic, but MS is saying they’ll only be available from MS stores and for business purchase online. Which means that it’ll do fuckall in competition with Apple. If you’re going to make a business decision that broadcasts ‘We don’t trust our OEMs to make a competitive product’ then why deliberately tie your hands on that very same decision for the sake of the OEMs? Either get into the hardware game or don’t – don’t fuck around and arbitrarily close off ¾ of the market from your product in some kind of welfare move for HP and Dell. If they wanted to do that, they could have done what Google does with Nexus and done the design in coordination with the OEMs and used it to help give them a free design channel.
I don’t think that MBP/MBA is better than any of those others to the user. I think that the MBP/MBA is better to Apple than those others are to their companies, and I think that gives Apple the weight to turn to Intel and demand that they make changes to how they design future chipsets that the OEMs have been powerless to do. I do not think that Thunderbolt would ever have been developed, nor do I think that Haswell would look anything like it does without Apple being able to leverage their success with those designs to force changes to the platform that benefits not just Apple but everyone else as well.
And this is the main problem with the commodity model – it cedes all power to those agents providing the commodity. HP, in spite of selling more PCs than anyone on the planet by a mile, has no fucking influence with either Intel or Microsoft. None. And if Intel or Microsoft decide to go rambling off into the weeds, HP has no goddamn choice but to follow them because they have nothing of their own making to grab onto to force a different course. Apple, with their pitiful marketshare has done more to influence the technical (vs economic) course of PC hardware than any other OEM in the last decade. How pitiful is it that everyone is now following Apple with their barely more than single digit share on PC design? You either need to accept that as a measure of technical superiority by Apple or a measure of market failure by everyone else. I’m actually more inclined to go with the latter than the former, to be honest. Apple’s designs are nice, and they often get an element here or there technically superior to everyone else (he says, typing from his 2880×1800 resolution laptop) but overall, there’s no reason why half a dozen other OEMs shouldn’t have beaten Apple to this if they didn’t have such shit business models that have left them as hollowed out shells of tech companies dependent on everyone else to do anything interesting with their products. Honestly, that’s shameful and I’m glad that Apple is a US company, but I sure as hell wish there was a bit more domestic leadership in the hardware space than what HP and Motorola and Dell have been providing.
? Martin
@PeakVT: And yet they can’t get the McDonalds across the street from my house in the right shopping center.
The undersea cable data exists because someone made it a pet project. I bet the accurate location of my one McDonalds would be more useful to more people using GMaps than the location of all undersea cables.
That might be impressive to you, but it suggests a lack of focus to me. Not saying Apple is better in this regard, just saying that most people don’t buy products for the sake of technical superiority. They buy them to solve problems, and undersea cables solves almost exactly zero problems, unlike knowing where you can buy breakfast.
Here’s a quite good writeup on what I mean.
tBone
@mistermix:
That’s the problem – aside from Google, the big dogs in mapping are NavTeq (owned by Nokia) and Tele Atlas, owned by – guess who? – TomTom. They could buy TomTom, but that doesn’t get them what they really need – better data for regions like Japan.
Launching their own maps solution was going to be painful for Apple no matter what. They compounded the problem by not being upfront about it with customers. “Our maps aren’t going to be all the way there on day one, but with your help we’ll make them insanely great” should have the postscript to the big Maps unveiling at WWDC.
Don
Thanks for the spoiler image; I haven’t caught up to this season yet.
scav
I doubt Goog is neglecting McDos to focus on undersea data. The undersea datas a fun to have, an angry birds for certain types of people. Keeping enough new things to swim or drive by is shop-window stuff for them and it’s not that intensive an investment as its more static. The inside the store stuff that should be coming is more tricky (as more volatile, although to a point that depends on which buildings / stores they chose to represent and what they do with it on top). NavTeq was exploring/moving there too (in-building I mean).
? Martin
@mistermix:
Motorola shouldn’t be giving anyone any terribly positive feelings here. Google has to walk the same tightrope as Microsoft is with their Surface. If Google turns Motorola into a top tier OEM, who the hell is going to stick around and try and compete with that? And oh, look, HTC has just made a big investment back in their WP platform… But not only is Motorola’s last announcement just a refresh, it’s also running an out of date OS. If there was any one thing that Google should have been able to get Motorola to do, it’s ship 4.1 devices, and they couldn’t even achieve that (though they thankfully dumped Motoblur). So, I’m not convinced Google is pushing Motorola terribly hard yet to become that top tier OEM. And I haven’t seen any word on whether the new Mot handsets get direct Google OS upgrades or whether the carriers still hold those keys (if we want to stick with the fucked up business model discussion). Apple got ⅓ of the eligible iOS devices ever sold upgraded to iOS 6 in a week. Something like half of all Android activations are still 2.x and will never get upgraded. Why are the carriers even involved in this? They have nothing to add to Android – all they do is fuck it up. Why even invite them? And why can’t even powerhouses like Samsung tell Verizon to go fuck themselves? Oh right, because Verizon will drop them from top marketing efforts and give that all to HTC because, again, it’s a commodity platform. And why am I as a user caught in the middle of this shitstorm?
JoeShabadoo
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
The death of Steve Jobs has absolutely nothing to do with Apple’s current problem.
There is reason Jobs hated Google so much; there was pretty much nothing he could do about Android inevitably taking over.
This is not a shot at Apple, they make a good product, but their business model, although great when basically starting the market, simply will not allow them to be the undisputed top of the heap in the long run. As phones get cheaper and Apple inevitably can’t keep up with all the innovations numerous companies add to hardware and Google adds to Android, Apple will slowly get pushed into a niche market. This one phone approach won’t allow Apple to be the dominant player in the long run and that is what we are seeing the beginning of. People will blame it on Jobs passing but they will be wrong.
@Paul: It’s not what the people I know in Beijing said.
PeakVT
@Martin: Who pays for Gmaps? If you did, you’re silly.
Also, Google is not immune to errors in the underlying data set, or lack of precision. For instance, shopping centers tend to be large, undifferentiated parcels with street addresses placed in somewhat haphazard ways, especially for stand-alone buildings in the parking lots. Example here. Until Google gets a more detailed data set, or a manual correction, it can only place addresses on a street by algorithm. And in this particular case, even machine vision wouldn’t help, as several businesses are located with their entrances where they can only be seen obliquely from surfaces where a car could legally drive. Bing has the same issue. Apple probably does too, but I don’t have access to the application to see.
If there’s an error in your area, feel free to correct Google, or provide them a data set that addresses the error you see.
The Other Chuck
@? Martin:
Asus is doing pretty well there too too, in fact their tablets are arguably superior to Samsung’s. They just don’t do phones. The Nexus 7 and Kindle have already carved out a market that expects a price that will eat away Apple’s famously high margins.
Still, it feels a little weird to read “Apple arch-rival Samsung” in articles. Never would have thought Samsung would become a lifestyle brand.
The Other Chuck
@PeakVT: It kills me that there are multiple reviews of all the McDonalds pinned on the map. Do people really check the reviews before going to _McDonalds_?
Ex Regis
On a trip to Richmond from the Virginia Peninsula I noticed that the iOS 6 map had an old name for a street near me. On my way back two days later the name had been corrected.
On my round trip I really appreciated the vector maps instead of the bit maps from the iOS 5 map. I could zoom in and out quickly without the really slow adjustments I was used to. As far as function is concerned, the new map is remarkably better than the old map on iDevices. It’s also more timely with its vocal directions than the Garmin unit I had purchased but abandoned because of its poor interface.
Lastly, the iOS 6 map gave me a locally optimal route that the iOS 5 map never gave me. I guess different people have different experiences, but I much prefer the new map. It is actually useful for the single traveler. The proper comparison is between different iOS maps, not with Android maps which have always been superior. It’s reasonable to hope that the iOS map will be at least as good as the Android map. I’m very pleased with the software interface, an Apple strength.
? Martin
@JoeShabadoo:
Unfortunately, iPod shows that your ‘inevitable’ conclusion isn’t necessarily inevitable. Further, the getting cheaper and innovations are competing efforts. As phones are getting cheaper, Android OEMs themselves are having trouble innovating because their profits are getting undercut. HTC is running break-even at best, leaving Samsung to do all the real heavy lifting there – which the can best afford to do given their own large component business. You’re going to wind up with one of 3 outcomes:
1) Samsung as sole top-tier Android OEM, leaving Android in no different position than Apple in terms of hardware choice and innovation.
2) Android phone prices falling to commodity levels as PCs have, starving the industry of profits and stagnating innovation even for players like Samsung, ceding that market to players like Apple who are able to hold up prices and margins due to iOS not being a commodity OS. Word is Google is planning on releasing a $99 tablet by the end of the year. How does anyone reserve money for R&D at those levels?
3) Apple expands their lineup downward as they did with iPod, eventually replicating 2) above by using ecosystem and retail network advantages to provide value to the platform, forcing competitors to lower prices to unsustainable levels. Apple still dominates portable music players, when by everyone’s conventional thinking, that should have been impossible because Apple would refuse to lower margins, yadda yadda yadda.
Keep in mind that we’re now at a technological plateau for phones, similar to the point that Apple reached with iPod when they decided to branch downward. There aren’t going to be any notable hardware advances to network infrastructure for a number of years, so once you hit LTE, you can tweak it this way and that (more bands, etc.) but there’s really no forward marching except on software in the near term (VoLTE, for example). Apple has already reached maximum screen density. They’re leading on CPU/GPU performance and that will keep going up, but it too will slow a bit as the easy gains in mobile performance get tapped out. Desktops aren’t getting 2-fold performance increases annually like mobile is, and mobile will eventually have to settle into the 25% gains that we see. Given that mobile is only about 4 years behind laptop performance now (the Apple A6 is about as fast as a low voltage Core2Duo from 2008) it should come in the next couple of years. There’s peripheral tech upgrades – NFC, Bluetooth, Wifi, but mobile is on the leading edge of those now, so those gains will also come more slowly. 802.11an will be next. Battery tech is notoriously slow for everyone, so don’t count on much there. And Apple’s even done their connector switch, so that’s not going to budge for another decade.
My point is that technological leaps from generation to generation are going to get a LOT smaller from this point on in phones. That means the market will shift to services (which may or may not favor Apple as maps shows) and to cost (which also may or may not favor Apple). But now is the time that we should be anticipating Apple making a market change. Without that hardware tech advancement, providing value is either a software proposition (which the Android OEMs are almost powerless to implement, as the PC OEMs became) or a cost proposition (which is what they’ll resort to as the PC OEMs did, lacking anything else). So, we should expect to see a price war developing by Samsung and HTC and Motorola with diminishing hardware differentiation, and we should expect to see Apple jump in and try and drive that pricing pressure by using their economies of scale to put out a lower-tier handset at a price and feature set that is just enough to squeeze the Android OEMs down to their cost, and Apple will starve the market out like they did with the music players.
That’s an easier job for Apple to do with tablets because they’re more dominant there. It’s marginal on phones whether Apple can do that or not, but if they can’t then the whole market is more likely to settle around 1) or 2). Either Apple and Samsung rule the market, or phone development largely stagnates as the cost consumers are willing to pay for phones drops pushing everyone out of a leadership position with Apple holding on as the only really profitable player (paralleling what the PC market looks like today).
Apple has done quite well by propping up market prices across their product line. In spite of being more expensive, they’re growing Mac share while everyone else drops. That shouldn’t be possible in your model. But Apple is aiming for a ‘reasonable, not prohibitive’ price premium. It works out to be $1 per day across the life of the device. If you can rationalize that price (a phone or laptop for less than a daily cup of coffee isn’t hard to rationalize) then Apple products really aren’t expensive (certainly as compared to a cup of coffee) and Apple has a secure market to work in. Undercutting that price doesn’t gain you anything, because the price is already rationalized.
And there’s precedent for doing this in the auto market. Nobody would even consider proclaiming that Toyota is going to kill BMW because they offer a Yaris for $14,000 where BMW’s cheapest is north of $25,000. The reason is that we broadly recognize an inherent value in cars which is currently set between $20,000 and $30,000. The average new car price in the US is currently $31,000. Yeah, lots of people can’t afford that, so there’s a $14000 price market, and a used car market, and there are lots of people who can afford $31000 but refuse to pay that much, but there’s enough of a market willing and eager to pay $25,000 and $30,000 and $40,000 for a car worldwide that price competition is minimally relevant to success in the market. You can’t be price uncompetitive for a given feature set, but feature set will almost always trump price in the market. That’s where Apple lives. And in a commodity market – either commodity hardware or commodity software – it’s really, really hard to compete on feature set, because you’re shipping the same feature set as the other entrants in the market. All you have left is price, and that’s why people make the constant mistake to assume that price is what drives the market because that’s what happened in the commodity market with Windows PC, and that only happened because there wasn’t a strong alternative. Apple was a disaster when that market matured. Apple isn’t a disaster now, and assuming that consumers will turn from features toward price is a foolish mistake that fails to understand the lessons of the past 20 years in tech.
yopd1
Damn, the only thing this post made me realize is I have to get back to watching Being Bad. I got to the 4th season on Netflix and have been on a lull for a bit. I know what I’m watching this weekend.
? Martin
@PeakVT:
I didn’t mean it that way. I meant in the larger sense of buying the device, now that every phone platform has a different (and home grown) mapping solution.
And my point there is that the map data has been wrong for years, and yet seems to be completely overlooked as being wrong while people criticize Apple maps. They’re pointing to these issues as evidence of ‘deal breaker’ errors on Apple’s part, but the same error has never been a deal breaker on Google’s (or Android’s as it were) as it’s been there for years. It’s not a criticism of Google so much as an observation that the ‘good enough’ threshold for map data is apparently much lower than people think it is. Should it be better?Of course. Will it affect people’s buying decisions or serve as a drag on the platform? I suspect not – or not to any notable degree.
And I note that the presence of undersea cables seems to be offered up as an example of ‘look how good Google maps are, they can now turn to these trivialities!’ when in fact, you can’t draw that conclusion at all as my example notes. Apple has their own side projects as well. That’s all they are.
Don K
Well, for years people using GPS devices haven’t been able to find my house, because my street is mislabeled (I suspect it’s because the township placed a misleading street sign at one corner – I’ll have to see if I can get them to fix that). I submitted a correction to Google a few years ago, and both Google and Open Street Maps are okay now. Reading this thread got me to submit a change request to TomTom just now.
PeterJ
No one has mentioned this, but Apple Maps will still be the default map app, and I doubt that Apple is going to let users change that.
So, if this takes 1-3 years to fix, then for next 1-3 iphone releases, the default map app will be faulty and/or inferior.
“It just don’t work”
scav
@? Martin: Apples’maps at the moment are getting more than McDos wrong, they’re putting towns wrong in places. Airports are appearing and disappearing. They have things appearing in the water in places. RR stations appear as parks. These are all correctable and, yes, I once saw a NavTeq POI database that had labeled all Subway Sandwich shops as Local Transport, but that was years ago — I’ve watched NavTeq data improve over time, I’ve watched Google data improve over time, so yes, I thoroughly expect Apple data to improve over time. Nevertheless, they fucked this up: there are real, significant and meaningful errors in that data Apple appears worse in comparison because they are coming to the game late and making rookie errors. You may not think it’s fair, can’t help that.
scav
@Don K: Don’t forget NavTeq. I think they’ve been getting better at responding to reported errors, they used to be a black hole even for corporate users.
oregon guy
I also live in Tokyo, and the lack of public transit in Apple Maps is a significant deal-breaker for me. (The transit grid here makes Europe look underserved, and makes large US networks like Washington and New York look sad and tiny)…
http://http://membres.multimania.fr/wadonoel/transit/tokyosuburban.gif
I have an iPhone, and as a consumer I’m willing to give Apple a chance to grow their product, but my standard is that they will provide some kind of option to transit users.
For now, I’m staying with iOS 5. I also have Hyperdia, which navigates the Japanese transit network really well, it just doesn’t show you where you are in it.
Don K
@scav:
Thanks. I just checked NavTeq and Mapquest, and their maps have my street labeled correctly.
iLarynx
@scav:
That worked. I am forevermore a Scav Maps fan. Danke.
Else wise for those interested: