Unless they’re already listed on Yelp, none of the shapes Apple has added appear in its search results or are labeled on its map. And this is a problem for Apple because AR is all about labels—but Apple’s new map is all about shapes.

So is Apple making the right map?







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1 Apple’s new map was released to the public on September 17, 2018 as part of iOS 12.

Unless otherwise noted, all screenshots of Apple’s old map were taken between September 10, 2018 and September 17, 2018. And all screenshots of Apple’s new map were taken between September 17, 2018 and September 24, 2018.

By the time you read this, Apple’s map may have changed. ↩︎





2 As recently as 2016, these two buildings were San Francisco’s second and third tallest. ↩︎





3 These building height regressions are surprising because they contradict TechCrunch’s claim that Apple’s buildings are now “more accurate”:

Better road networks, more pedestrian information, sports areas like baseball diamonds and basketball courts, more land cover, including grass and trees, represented on the map, as well as buildings, building shapes and sizes that are more accurate. A map that feels more like the real world you’re actually traveling through. ↩︎





4 Consider that just two years after it started adding algorithmically extracted buildings to its map, Google had already added the majority of the U.S.’s buildings. But after four years, Apple has only added buildings in 64% of California and 9% of Nevada. ↩︎





5 All of this new detail is not without cost. In many areas, Apple Maps’s roads are now harder to see than before. ↩︎