Tim Cook Calls Apple Maps Launch His 'First Really Big Mistake' as CEO (macrumors.com)
- Reference: 0181942132
- News link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/26/04/23/1642215/tim-cook-calls-apple-maps-launch-his-first-really-big-mistake-as-ceo
- Source link: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/23/tim-cook-apple-maps-launch-his-really-big-mistake/
> Reflecting on [4]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."
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-22/tim-cook-regrets-maps-flub-sees-apple-watch-as-his-proudest-work
[2] https://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/09/19/153210/major-backlash-looms-for-apples-new-maps-app
[3] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/23/tim-cook-apple-maps-launch-his-really-big-mistake/
[4] https://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/11/28/1656258/apple-axes-head-of-mapping-team
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
> 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 [1]here [wikipedia.org] not [2]here [wikipedia.org]. Worked out because their routes would always take them through the latter.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Wayne_(Detroit)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Wayne,_Indiana
Re: (Score:2)
Well at least it didn't try to take them [1]here [wikipedia.org]...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Apache,_The_Bronx
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
> 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
Ooh! Ooh! (Score:1)
Now do 'giving millions of dollars in bribes - er, gifts - to Trump in order to secure exemptions from certain tariffs.'
Tim? Are you there? Hello?
Is this thing on?
Re: (Score:2)
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!)
what Tim Cook should have done (Score:2)
Was build a front end for OpenStreetMaps, with the option to download your local area within a couple hundred miles so it won't be downloading map data everytime you use it, and only have minimal downloads for searches for specific street addresses or locales like various landmarks which the downloaded locales will probably have already
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Same, always fine for me (Score:1)
I was always surprised at the hate, never had usability issues from the start and the color scheme looked so much more cohesive than googlily/waze stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
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)
Nah bro. It was the xserve discontinuance in 2011. That was the start of the "we hate corporate customers" line. Forcing new customers to put OSX Server on a Mac Mini, then eventually getting rid of OSX Server. Then getting rid of nearly any system that helps large organizations use Apple products. Horrible business practice. We saw artists throw away their iphones because they weren't allowed iMacs at work. It was wild.
And it stil isn't ready (Score:1)
It's still shit.
He's still lying though... (Score:1)
Because the best map apps are Chinese, and it's not even close.
Re: He's still lying though... (Score:1)
China needs a good maps app for when they take over the world when the US and Israel goes broke trying to conquer Iran and keep the petrodollar afloat, I for one welcome our Chinese overlords
Re: (Score:2)
Didn't we see this forecasted in Firefly?
Re: He's still lying though... (Score:2)
I never caught that show
"Now we've got the best map app on the planet" (Score:2)
Never lose your sense of humor, Tim
Never got the hate (Score:5, 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: (Score:3, 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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Well, if it is fixed now and people are using it, is it a failure?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Now? No. At launch? Absolutely. Fuck you for excusing a company launching a broken product. You are the problem.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
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?
Re: (Score:3)
Google Maps (2022)
[1]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
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-sued-negligence-maps-driver-died-collapsed-bridge-north-carolina-hickory/
Re: (Score:3)
[1]https://topclassactions.com/la... [topclassactions.com]
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
[1] https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/class-action-lawsuit-targets-flawed-apple-maps-app/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2012/oct/01/apple-30-billion-maps-mistake
Re: (Score:2)
It's a deflection answer. Did you really think he was going to say "Vision Pro!!" or "that hockey puck mouse! Now there was some really f'ed up engineering!!!"
Re: (Score:2)
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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That could be because they got data from the city and the city plans have the roads there even though they don't exist yet. Another possibility is that they're adding made up roads or features to try to catch people who might be copying their data for their own map app. It was commonplace for cartographers back in the day to add a made up river or town to their maps so they could catch people who were copying their work instead of making their own map.
I'm more inclined to believe the former case. I'm cur
Re: (Score:2)
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)
its still not as good as goodle it looks alot nicer; its better presented; prettier; far more detailed- but actual business listings etc and finding resuraunts is harder than google as many listings are outdated or simply not there; as i guess said businesses havent created profiles for their location; and i think apple's ability to just find that themselves using other open data sources has been more limited; but maybe places only think to be on google i may be wrong on this but when i look for resuraunt
Re: (Score:2)
It only ever got me lost, so I stopped using it. This was in the neighborhood of 2013-15. I know a guy who was still using it a couple months ago, and it kept routing him the long way to every destination. But for all I know he had some setting to prefer major roads.
Re: (Score:3)
> 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
Re: (Score:2)
> "Way to go outing yourself as someone who lives locally to Cupertino. For anyone else who actually used it was fucking terrible."
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