Staying with the Apple theme, I had this email in from reader Mike Strefford who makes a series of points I found stimulating. Over to Mike:
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The deeper issue for me is what the maps fiasco says about the change in attitudes within Apple.
It is literally impossible that Apple did not know that Maps was rubbish. I found massive errors in the first 3 searches i tried on my friend’s phone — so given the level of quality and user testing Apple are renowned for they knew it was crap.
Steve Jobs would have launched the iPhone 5 and delayed iOS6. The new Apple gave all their users a very substandard experience. Have they stopped caring? Does Tim Cook not get it in the same way that Jobs did?
Apple is a success today because the innovators and early adopters bought into their vision and became champions for them into the majority of the consumer market. If they lose that they could lose everything.
But don’t worry, the iPhone 5S in 12 months time will fix everything and you can pay again for what you already have 🙂
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I love the last sentence in particular Mike 😉
What do you think? Are we witnessing a new Apple?
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More likely technical option would have been to revert to Google maps within iOS6. iOS5 would not support iPhone 5 hardware (I think). But either way, loss of face would have been huge. With Google and the world. May have been contractual problems too.
True, and that would have been an acceptable fallback position as well. My point is that Apple knowingly put out a crap user experience with NO fallback.
For a company that has been renowned (and rightly so) for focusing on the user experience to deliver great quality this is VERY different behaviour.
Whether it is symptomatic of a broader shift to a consumer led company or a one off is still to be seen.
I think the best option might have been to rebrand Apple Maps as a beta of the turn-by-turn navigation app alongside the existing google maps stuff. People using it for navigation would have added and corrected a lot of POIs over the next year which is the main area that there seem to be issues with.
In the mean time, reports of missing places could have been fixed. These places are generally all mapped and its likely that the data providers used do have this information. I can’t imagine that TomTom doesn’t have the correct name for Doncaster, for example. Or that they don’t have maps of Stroud.
There seem to be a lot of negative rumblings beyond the maps fiasco. I’ve read & seen plenty of commentary concerning loose internal batteries (causing rattles), to rattling camera modules, to easily scratched anodized back panel finishes, to poor battery life. With the recent news that quality control departments are being overrun by disgruntled factory workers at FOXCONN, one might wonders if something more severe is occurring in the supply chain.