The interesting question here, to me anyway, is whether this whole debacle is a sign of a real problem at Apple, or whether it was just an "oops" (like the iPhone antenna).
The conventional wisdom (for the past decade or so) has been that Apple doesn't release "beta" products. Google and MS do, but not Apple. However, this is clearly such a product (they must have known it wasn't as good as what it was replacing).
So either Apple is changing (which would be understandable, but still interesting) or this was just an error in judgment somewhere in the chain of command (which itself would be a real change, at least from the Jobs era).
Sure it is, they're just different manifestations with different side effects. The root is the same misunderstanding, the combination of underestimating the market and overestimating your shitty product. They did the same thing with an entrenched product with Final Cut Pro.
People want to say this kind of thing never would have happened with Steve in charge. Nonsense. This kind of thing did happen with him in charge.
Apple probably knows they are making a big sacrifice in the shorterm for a (hopefully) longterm benefit. The problem is the two major all-in-one map providers, Google and Microsoft, are building their own mobile ecosystems and directly competing with Apple. Apple is/was at risk of anti-competitive behavior from both; in fact, that may be exactly what happened.
I don't know. It seems to me that a lot of Apple decision makers live in a single geographic location. It would be difficult for them to get an overall feel. Perhaps that specific area was focused on and improved drastically recently and they mistook that as an indicator of worldwide quality.
Or (c) you actually don't know as much about Apple as you think. Apple has routinely released 1.0 products that contained major flaws in one way or another.
It's just that Apple polishes those flaws so they aren't as glaring. And they've been doing this since the very beginning of Steve Jobs' second reign i.e. OSX.
I agree, badly flawed new products are hardly something unusual in the Apple world. What makes Maps such a big deal is that it's not a 1.0 to the users, but rather a 6.0 that's a huge regression from 5.0. Yes, underneath it's basically a new product, but users don't care about that, they just care that the last version was a whole lot better.
It's just that Apple polishes those flaws so they aren't as glaring.
Actually, I'd say one of the things is that Apple often release radically new things, so yes there are bugs, but it's so new and different, with much other advantages, that people overlook the bugs, or comparing it with existing offerings is an apples & oranges comparison.
In this case, maps like Apple are releasing are not new. We've had Google Maps et al. for years, so people have come to know what a maps app can do. Apple's offering is not radically different from Google Maps, there's nothing new here. It's completely fair to compare Apple's Maps with OSM or Google Maps, and in that comparison Apple is far behind/
The conventional wisdom (for the past decade or so) has been that Apple doesn't release "beta" products. Google and MS do, but not Apple. However, this is clearly such a product (they must have known it wasn't as good as what it was replacing).
So either Apple is changing (which would be understandable, but still interesting) or this was just an error in judgment somewhere in the chain of command (which itself would be a real change, at least from the Jobs era).