Un-fucking-believable. The CEO of Apple has come right out and admitted that Maps is sub-par, and the Apple fans are still trying to pretend that the problems are not real.
Sure the problem are real - for other people. But not for me. When I upgraded, I expected maps to suck. To my surprise, moving the map around was smoother, it was easier to read, and the display for directions are better.
I also think that's why Apple released it: there are genuine improvements in some areas, but they underestimated how important the missing features are to some people. For some people, the transit features are the reason to use Maps, so it's obviously inferior for them.
Well, nobody is saying that Maps is awful for everybody. A lot of people are, however, saying that Maps is awful for roughly nobody, and that the complainers are either Apple haters, influenced by the media, never actually tried the app, etc.
"I don't deny that new Maps aren't at the level that GMaps were, but they're not really that terrible, either. Unless you required a feature that is gone now (transit, which I don't), then it's really not so bad, at least in my experience, and has improved since the betas."
How much clearer does it need to be? He comes out and says, right there, that the parts that aren't outright missing are fine. This is not my experience, nor is it the experience of many other people I've talked to.
But that is my experience, and was exactly what I said up top. For how I use Maps, the new version is better in every way; I'm actually quite impressed with the animation of scaling and moving around on the map, and with the clarity of features (roads, parks, rivers, etc.).
Yes, you are talking about your experience, and that's fine. eddieroger, however, was talking about everybody's experience, and claiming that the new Maps is just fine, for everybody, unless you need one of the features that's outright missing. That is simply false.
I have yet to hear someone complain about Maps other than missing features - both personally, and observed through chatter online. So his comment gels with everything I know. I'm curious to learn about people complaining about something other than missing features, so if you can point me to them or say what your experiences are, I'd like to know.
1. Check out the location of my new house. Apple's data is years old and predates the whole development. The area is new, but not THAT new. Google and OpenStreetMap both have it fine.
2. Use it to navigate to a park I'd never been to before. Get told "you have arrived" while going under an interstate overpass. Find a driveway to pull off in, spend about ten minutes screwing around with the park's web site verifying the address, finding a better map, etc., finally figure out that the app sent me about half a mile in the wrong direction down this road. Google, of course, has the correct location for the address.
3. Use it to navigate to a restaurant I'd never been to before. "You have arrived" happens in front of a tiny strip mall with no restaurants. Wander around the area for a while and finally find it. Later on I check to see what happened, and it's pretty incredible. Maps had been opened with a link of the form, Restaurant@latitude,longitude. Stripping off the "Restaurant@" portion gives the correct location. With the restaurant name in it, Maps ignored the lat/lon and preferred its POI data, which was just plain wrong.
At that point, I gave up on the thing. Note that this is not the sequence of bad experience that were interspersed with good ones. These are the only experiences I had in using the thing, aside from two trivial tests navigating to and from day care which I do almost every day anyway.
Many other people I've talked to report similar experiences. Addresses are misplaced, POIs are misplaced, stuff is mislabeled or severely out of date, etc.
That sucks. Looking at what you said and others in the thread, it sounds like the biggest problem is the data. I've done a bunch of spot-checks of locations near me, but I'm in the NYC area. I assume the NYC area would get a lot of attention for map data.
(By the way, the above is response is much more constructive than saying "un-fucking-believeable" in response to someone who is not aware of problems.)
On the contrary - her experiences with Maps were under the assumption she had not been upgraded at all. Her pleased experience transferred to the new maps, based on the expectation that they were still Google provided. She didn't magically decide that the maps were great.
The quality of the maps are not universally good or bad. It's a very local issue. If you have good map data in your area then you may have a great experience with Maps. If you have bad map data in your area you will have a terrible experience.
Of course. I've yet to encounter anybody who says that Maps is universally bad for everybody. But many Apple fanboys insist that Maps is universally good, except for a very few outliers, like eddieroger did.
