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Apple is officially done rebuilding its maps in the US:
To say Apple Maps stumbled out of the gate is putting it mildly; it quickly became an internetpunchline when it launched in 2012, and left the company with the unenviable job of fixing it. Since then, Apple has been rebuilding the most fundamental part of the experience -- the base maps themselves -- and today the company says it's finally done. Well, in the United States, anyway.
Getting to this point was no small feat. It's been nearly a year and a half since Apple announced its plans, but even before that, a fleet of LIDAR-equipped vans was criss-crossing the United States to capture as much detailed location data as possible. To gather even more geographical context, Apple also captured map data from the air, though it's not clear how many planes the company employed for this work. While Apple wouldn't confirm any increases in budget or staff to make all of this possible, the company's investment in the project seems significant, and there's still more to come. The big push to re-map the United States is now officially done, but Apple has earmarked some of its LIDAR vans for maintenance runs -- that is, they'll continue to roam on roads to make sure that hard-won data remains up to date.
The end result is a more accurate set of maps that you might have already been looking at -- the company has been pushing them live around the country for at least the past six months. There are a few telltale signs to look out for if you're not sure: Coastlines are more accurately represented, as are buildings like airports and malls. When we reviewed iOS 13, we also noticed more nuanced street-level data; there were more street labels on-screen compared to Google Maps, and more streets had traffic direction indicators. That might not sound like a big deal, but it's really helpful when trying to orient yourself when you're emerging from the subway.
(Score: 3, Informative) by barbara hudson on Saturday February 01 2020, @01:46AM (6 children)
Tried it a few hours ago, and maps now actually work in my neighbourhood. Including bus schedules telling me when to leave when I want to arrive at my appointment for a certain time on a certain day.
Turns out that next week I can leave half an hour after I was planning to. :-)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 01 2020, @04:01AM (5 children)
That's good news, but I'm still not hopeful.
We live 1/4 mile down a curving shared driveway with 6 other houses - it's a private drive, but we get all kinds of deliveries to the door. The UPS/FedEx/Amazon/Laser ship/etc. regular drivers figure it out after their first screw up, but anytime there's a new guy we've got to retrain them. When we give people directions to the house, about half of them still get it wrong on the first try - the half that use iPhones, because Apple maps takes them to the next street over where they can see our house across a horse pasture but they can't get to it.
Google Maps has a "fix my map" feature that, after 2 years of trying, I finally got the driveway fixed up sufficiently well that people using Android phones can get to the house on their first try - it's still not quite exactly right, but it's close enough.
Odds that the Apple scanning contractor actually drove down our driveway and correctly input all the house numbers: vanishingly small.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday February 01 2020, @04:18AM (4 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 01 2020, @04:34AM (2 children)
Which we do, but I don't know about at your latitude but around here delivery folks tend to be a high turnover job, like 1-2 new drivers per month, and iPhone users seem to double down on their beloved hunk of junk when you tell them that it is somehow inferior.
Are you talking about Apple? That wasn't an apparent available option the last 3 times we looked for it - Google maps at least had a place to submit corrections, even though their turnaround was to ignore 1/2 of the suggestions, take 3-6 weeks to respond to the suggestions they didn't ignore entirely, and they never actually redrew the map as I submitted it - the first two modifications they made actually made things worse - finally on the third revision we got something that works for our address.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Saturday February 01 2020, @04:52AM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 01 2020, @05:02AM
We've lived with this situation for 6+ years, the new maps can't be any worse... though those iPhone people probably do deserve to be woken up for something as trivial as this - thanks for the suggestion!
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 01 2020, @07:50AM
Babs, friends don't let friends uses iOS.
Should have gotten a PinePhone.