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Apple Maps’ offering might surprise people who remember its disastrous launch in 2012, which the Guardian described as the company’s “first significant failure in years”. Users were more than furious – they were lost, sometimes dangerously so. In Australia, police had to rescue tourists from the huge Murray-Sunset national park, after Maps placed the city of Mildura in the wrong place by more than 40 miles. Some of the motorists located by police had been stranded for 24 hours without food or water. In Ireland, ministers had to complain directly to Apple after a cafe and gardens called “Airfield” was designated by the service as an actual airport.
But mostly the map was just glitchy and unhelpful, its directions always a little off kilter. Users revolted and Apple made a rare retreat, allowing Google Maps to be used as the default on many iPhone apps and apologizing for the product.
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But with one earbud in and Siri activated, you can have a friendly voice guide you through a foreign city, drifting you towards cycle lanes and safer routes and navigating often complex one-way systems.
In my hometown of London, where a lot of cycling routes are pathways in woods or through reservoirs, it has a habit of sending you down these dark and sometimes dangerous paths at night when the streets are much quicker and mostly empty.
In the post-apocalyptic, post-internet world in HBO’s The Last Of Us, there’s a scene in which the main character Joel, having spent weeks traversing an icy wasteland, happens upon a small cottage inhabited by an old couple.
As Cue himself recognises, “there are really only two mapmakers left in the world, in ourselves and Google” – and that monopoly of information, says Clancy Wilmott, a professor specialising in digital cartographies at Berkley, has consequences.
For their part, the Apple Maps engineers I spoke with acknowledged that they were more reliant on AI, aerial photography and existing data in rural settings and were focusing on expanding to more cities.
I’d say: ‘Once you’re on Ascension and you see the brick column, that driveway right after is mine.’ We’ve been working hard on that as well,” Cue says, adding that the future might be Siri telling you to “make a left at the yellow house”.