Apple should just buy Australia and fix the streets to match Maps.
Nah, they would never let the Americans into the country to buy them. They have the best border controls ever.
Oh look! Someone who refuses to acknowledge a hard known fact...
Apple, you are too late and too slow. Can I call you Microsoft?
The Apple maps in Washington and Oregon state have been a MAJOR fail. I used to be pretty much an Apple fanboi, but no longer. And a fanboi for 30 years.
Apple, your maps suck. You are too slow to respond. That's an understatement.
You should have been jumping through your butts when you saw issues. But you are not. You are taking your sweet time. You are becoming MS.
You know, maybe you should eat some crow and at least let me set Google Maps App and CHROME as my default apps for maps and web. Okay?
Since Steve died, the company has deflated like a balloon.
And, I'm tired of Cook talking about how "INCREDIBLE" and "AWESOME" everything is. How about under promising and over-delivering?
And if you don't come out with a bigger phone, I may jump ship. I will keep my MacBook Pro. Best computer ever.
And stop jacking customers on iPad? What a ripoff. Double the memory and add $100? Add LTE and it's $129 more? Even the most reasonable iPad mini is $549 with 32 GB RAM and LTE. NO THANKS! Especially with the ****** resolution.
BYe!!
Glad you have the documents of the internal negotiations. Can you share them with us?
Apple should just buy Australia and fix the streets to match Maps.
Android fan posing as a "longtime Apple fanboi"?
The Steve Jobs argument is just plain old at this point. Steve was the one who made the decision to switch. Decisions like that aren't just made overnight...
So I was wondering, the problems with Maps in Australia are chronic (police have reported several life threatening situations where members of the public and even state authorities have been confused by mapping data provided by Apple, eg location of wild fires in relation to a town people have been order to evacuate)... but I had assumed it was a universal problem flowing from a structural design flaw, not something specific to Australia.
What I am talking about isn't the poor quality of low level data (eg, it can't find a fruit shop that is just around the corner from my house, yet gives a search result of somewhere 12,000 kms away).
There's a much bigger, more wore spread, significant problem.
Maps doesn't know where whole towns and even whole cities are.
And beyond that, it lists whole towns that do not exist.
The source of the problem is that it adds a marker on Maps that looks like it is meant to designate a town or city (and it looks like that because that is what it does do, some of the time)... but often the marker is actually placed at the geographic centre of a District. And the marker gets a label that is the District name. Which has nothing to do with the location or even existence of a town or city.
So we end up with a map that shows me South East Queensland - say 250 km top to bottom.
I see a town marker for Brisbane (pop 1.5 million), and it is in the correct location.
I see a town marker for Moreton, about 50km north of Brisbane. There is no such town. There is a district called Moreton. So maybe it is based on that.
I see a town marker called Redland, located on North Stradbroke Island. There is no town of Redland. There is a district called Redland, and Straddie is in that district.
I see Noosa (a real town) with no marker. As I zoom down on Noosa, no marker ever appears. Until I get to some suburbs, and streets.
Anyway - what I'm getting at is, this seems a structural flaw with underlying design of mapping data, not a specific locality based problem.
Or are they going to literally go through every district and town in Australia? if so, crowdsource it, outsource it, call it WikiMaps and it will be fixed in a month.
But, is this general problem where whole districts get turned into fictitious towns, and where real towns don't get any label at all, just an Australia specific problem?
ps, no replies that you shouldn't rely on a map to help tell you where you are. Don't call it a map if it can't do that.
It sure seemed like it was, perhaps in a rage. Surely many Apple employees knew that maps was not ready but were afraid to say anything.
Yes, it's only "multiple sources familiar with Apples thinking," but if you can't accept that as a source then we have no business discussing Apple, period. Do we ever get greater confirmation than that?
One anonymous source is suspect, but once a reporter gets multiples I'm inclined to believe it unless the other party involved comes out and disagrees. (This smells like a planned leak from Apple, honestly.)
So if you have a source where Google denies it...says that All Things D is full of crap...then I'll swing my opinion back the other way. But until then, I'll take "multiple sources along with no-Google-denial" as pretty damning evidence.
. It wasnt happy simply providing back-end data. It asked for in-app branding. Apple declined. It suggested adding Google Latitude.
Oh, sure, I loved the idea of picking either 'no-turn-by-turn' or 'ads in my maps.'
While I don't like to argue with trolls, no matter how bad Apple maps is right now Apple has no choice in the matter. To quote Jobs "Apple didn't suddenly get into search; Google got into mobile phones".
A couple of comments:
First, Apple should be hiring a bloody army of fact checkers.
Second, they should trust the army of fact checkers they already have: their users. Apple needs to start paying attention to crowd-sourced problems with iOS Maps, otherwise they come off as rude, aloof, and incompetent.
Third, I can just imagine the office if the Map Ground Truth Data Specialist: On the right of their desk is a monitor with an iOS Map information editor. On the left is a monitor with Google maps....
>Apple did eventually fix the issue in central Australia, but the company has been slow to fix many mapping issues even through the app's official "Report a Problem" button.<
Where I am at the moment (Tascott NSW) is confidently placed by Maps on the "Tasman Sea" (doh! it's on Brisbane Waters over 10 kms from said Sea). All easily fixable but Maps should never have been released in its current parlous state.
Can you point where those "multiple sources familiar with Apple’s thinking" say
"Oh, sure, I loved the idea of picking either 'no-turn-by-turn' or 'ads in my maps.'"
Ah, I see where I overstepped. I'm one of those guys who sees all intrusions into my privacy as the same thing, so I'm not so careful about my wording when I complain about one or the other. It's all just "bad" in my mind.
But if you're the type who sees different exploitations of your personal life as shades of grey...well, ok. Yes. I didn't mention the exact correct shade of grey there. I didn't really think about that because of my outlook.
How about a "ground truth specialist" in every country?
Apple Maps are obsolete second tier garbage.
Apple, please do us all a favor and do not listen to this suggestion.
Maybe it's live threatening to drive to the middle of the desert in Australia, miles off the roads. However, in England I would consider it live threatening if you drove your car onto a cricket ground in the middle of a game, got out of the car and asked for a pint of bear. And if you follow Google Maps directions to the pub in my village, that's exactly what you would end up doing. All you want is a pint of beer, and suddenly you are surrounded by some very, very angry cricket players.
Oh look! Someone who refuses to acknowledge a hard known fact...