“No doubt the images popping up on the Internet of misnamed cities and misplaced landmarks [in Apple’s new Maps app] don’t comport with the usual narrative surrounding Apple, a company that’s enjoyed approving media coverage for metronomelike execution as it’s redefined standards of excellence in its smartphone and tablet computing platforms,” Charles Cooper reports for CNET.
“Apple could have kept Google’s more reliable and mature mobile mapping app, but it made a strategic decision about something it needed to own and monetize. Put another way, getting rid of Google Maps was more important than delivering a less-flawed Apple Maps app and dealing with the grumbling.” Cooper opines. “But how long is that [grumbling] going to last? Many may remember the heart attacks over ‘Antennagate,’ when some owners of the then-new iPhone 4 complained about weak or lost signal strength when they touched an area near the device’s antennas. That also was supposed to be the end of the world as we know it. Nowadays it’s just a footnote and Apple’s shares are hovering near an all-time high.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: With every major Apple product release we get the same old overblown, overreactive, wastes of time. (BTW: We used Apple’s Maps this weekend to travel back roads 240 miles through three US states and it was absolutely FLAWLESS. In fact, it suggested the same exact routes that Google Maps did – we checked.)
These brouhahas that happen when Apple releases a major product are a result of the media echo chamber, some amount of planned FUD by companies that sell other mapping apps or competing phones, and are all the result of a desire of every media outlet on earth to somehow use the name “Apple” in a story and also to cater to those who aren’t getting an iPhone 5 this weekend, who therefore won’t have the most gorgeous useful pocket computer ever designed and built, and who therefore need something to assuage their envy of those of us who do. (“Look, Mable, there’s one of those new iPhone 5s. The news says that the Maps don’t work, so we don’t need to feel bad that all we have are these plastic iPhone wannabes that AT&T guy told us to buy.”)