Do they really use Open Street Map? I thought they licences data from TomTom.

Both (and more, too).

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/11/3078987/apple-tomtom-opens...

Actually Apple does have a big part in it. They bring together all the data from Tom Tom, Waze, OSM etc as well as the two teams they purchased: C3 and Placebase into one coherent product.

It's amazing that Apple has nearly matched Google in some parts (maps, directions) and far exceeded them in others (3D).

Apple has not "nearly matched" google, not at all. Maybe in the US they have, but in New Zealand, where google is as good as any of the local street maps/directories, if not better normally, the new ios maps is atrocious. The places are now even worse too, because they're relying on Yelp, who don't have a presence here at all.

Maybe he works for Apple, they're his main client or owns lots of stock or something.

The Apple worship is truly mind-boggling.

OpenStreetMap is where the crucial data comes from. And if I'm not mistaken it's submitted by volunteers.

Yep. You don't like my opinion so clearly I must be working for Apple or own stock. In fact it is neither.

And at no point did I say that OSM wasn't responsible for the map data. Only that Apple added other pieces from other companies.

No, no, no. No problem with your opinion. You can love Apple if you want. I just struggle to understand how you and others can see Apple in the light that you do, and be blinded to all else. I mean, the value to me is the data and the fact it's online. The database itself. I have my own systems for manipulating the data the way I want it (I would think most HN nerds would have similar skills, but maybe not). That's just me. Others seem to love things because they are produced by some popular company. And for no other reason. I just can't really understand it. These are computers produced in Chinese factories. Getting cheaper everyday. Data can be visualised in myriad ways.

Call it like you see it. Minds may differ.

You won't be able to understand many things if your preferred method is to ignore facts that would make them understandable.

So much condescension...

Actually Google should be the same as local street directories since that is where they get there data from. I live in Australia (hi, neighbour) and it is Sensis (Yellow/White Pages) who supply data to Google.

As for quality of maps it is about 80% as good as Google and has been getting noticeably better over time.

I was under the impression that Google has their own places product, so I suspect they combine several sources.

AFAIK they maintain that by buying a lot of commercial place data.

Haven't the street view cars been down under yet?

I'll take transit navigation and street view before slightly improved 3D any day.

> far exceeded them in others (3D).

Actually Google and Apple have pretty similar systems for 3d maps. Apple are in beta with their new version for ios6, which will have slightly better resolution than (the current, been there for a while) Google Earth, but not hugely so. See for comparison http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/iphone-news/3d-maps-comparison-...

Nokia are producing similar 3d maps, although again slightly lower resolution than Google.

I think more importantly than resolution will be coverage. 3d maps of the centre of major cities are one thing, but the whole world is a very different challenge, and one we have no clear idea of a winner on.

This might be the 3D map that Nokia will use in their phone if you want to compare: http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/index.html

I wonder if the iPhone 5 will have a bigger screen. The iPhone 4 screen seems very tiny compared to my Galaxy Nexus. What is the use of fancy 3d if the screen is tiny?

Actually we do. Apple supports 26 cities. Google supports 13.

Where did you get those numbers? As far as I can tell, more that one hundred cities have textured buildings in Google Earth (they were created by building maker https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/earth/learn/3dbuildings.ht...) as well as in mobile maps (http://www.google.co.uk/mobile/maps/3d/ my city has 3d outlines and it's not even in the map). Apple maps too should have at least 40 cities in 3D.

All things equal, Apple doesn't support any cities yet since their mapping program hasn't been released.

I thought OSM was copyleft similar to the GPL. Can you combine OSM with proprietary data and without the licence forcing you to open up everything?

Their license used to be horrible for commercial use, but mostly because it was an extremely bad fit for a data collection, leading to lots of confusion over what was ok and not.

A better comparison for their current license would be the LGPL - as long as you keep your proprietary data separate from the OSM data, you don't need to release it but you still need to release any changes to the OSM data itself.

To be clear, the license has not changed yet. We're in the process of changing the license (and they recently announced [0]) that the next full-planet data dump will be under the new license, but it hasn't been switched yet.

[0] http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2012/09/06/your-first-odbl-pla...

The old OSM licence was CC-BY-SA, but it is being changed to a new 'database licence'