Until they fix it by partnering with a real mapping company, they didn't recognize the depth of the problem.

So you don't regard TomTom as real mapping company? Apple has partnership with them and a dozen others. They also aquired Placebase, Poly9 and C3.

This is a radical change from how we might have imagined Steve Jobs dealing with this situation.

I can imagine a scenario in which Steve spins the maps snafu so that the customers end up apologizing to him.

"In Steve Job's Apple, the customer is always wrong."

So you don't find it admirable that Steve stands by his products?

Honestly, I think if he were still healthy and running the company, something like this would not have happened in the first place.

I found it disturbing how willing the (vocal portion of the) apple fanbase seemed to be to say up is down and black is white if he told them to. One day PPC is much faster than x86, the next it doesn't matter. One day a phone doesn't need to run programs because everything is on the web, the next everything should be an app. Maybe it's just the ones who disagreed stayed quiet, but the overall effect was very cultish.

Apology can be accepted if they fast track google's map application to at least mitigate this mess. I am glad that I didn't update my iphone to ios6. The wife isn't so happy that I update her phone!

Google says they're not yet working on such an app.

I think it's cute how Apple-customers takes for granted that Google will fix Apple's problems to make their life better instead of promoting its own platform.

They could trivially bring Google Maps from iOS5 to iOS6... if Apple wanted them to.

Why do you say that? Google didn't make the the Maps app in previous versions of iOS, Apple did—they just used Google's data.

Apple could, and apparently they have a year left on their contract?

I can't say for sure what Jobs would have done, but you can bet that Jobs would have known about Maps' limitations on Day 1, and he would have addressed the issue right away instead of waiting for 2 weeks like Tim Cook.

Remember: Jobs used the products extensively before they were launched. If Tim had done so, he would have seen the deficiencies in Maps, instead of just relying on his underlings saying "it'll be OK".

You can say the same thing about the antenna problem. Which Jobs did not know the limitations of.

LOL.

These maps have been available as part of iOS 6 betas for a long time. Apple already knew about the problem, but you can only move so fast. Maps are hard.

This letter isn't really an apology, it's a "use these other things while we update our data".

When i first heard Tim Cook was going to become CEO, my first assumption was that jobs chose him to lock in his legacy as a genius CEO... Sometimes, stories like this make me thing that there's a possibility thats true.

Steve Jobs was a geek after all. Tim Cook is an industrial engineer, with a lot of history in in computing.

Does anyone think they don't realize the maps are subpar? The problem is, they can't get better data without having millions of users interact with it daily. Their only option was to do the startup-y approach and launch not-perfect then keep iterating. In another year nobody (except for the extreme nerdophiles) will remember apple maps being disadequate.

>In another year nobody (except for the extreme nerdophiles) will remember apple maps being disadequate.

I think if it gets the average user lost or late even once or twice, they will remember and not trust it. It will also have given people who decided to buy an Andorid or other phone instead of the iPhone 5 justification for their mobile platform choice/change.

How do users interacting with the map app make it better? Are you supposed to input addresses of businesses and apple stores that?

There is a "Report Problem" feature where users can enter corrections or note problems. As far as simply using the app, I'm not sure either- anyone have additional insight?

You expect this kind of apology from a Web startup (Tumblr has posts similar to this every few months), but not from Apple.

Map is OK for me. It is just only the beginning. When Google Map was launched, we didn't see all the features. The only problem with iOS6 was viewing Unicode Language in Mail App. It is really frustrating.

That isn't the only problem. It's the only problem _you_ care about.

If Jobs were there, they wouldn't have release the phone with maps. What they should have done is put both maps and google maps on at the same time and have a switch off date for google.

You don't understand Jobs - this solution would have been a cluster and really hamstrung the new iOS maps app. Apple is not afraid to release a new version that is a downgrade - check out iMovie '08 or even FCP X.

Your suggestion sounds more like a solution that Google or Microsoft would do - they don't care so much about creating UI confusion for the customer as much as giving them choice (simpler move, as that abrogates the vendor having to make the call).

May be it is a sign ...like vista for windows....