Wow. Hopefully, Ternus will bring what he brought to Apple's hardware to their software. The hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else, but their software gets worse and worse every generation. I'm glad to hear this.
> “When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy,” said Ternus. “But the team had just been over the years just pushing and pushing and pushing. And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing. If you have the vision and you're persistent and you keep working at it, you can take something you know that has a rocky start and turn it into something great.”
Here's hoping he recognizes that Apple's current generation of software is in the "rocky start" phase, not the "pushing and pushing" phase and definitely not the "absolutely amazing" phase. Time will tell...
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/apples-joz-and-ternus-on...
I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apples-minimalist-ive-assume...
Yes, being rich.
Absolutely.
Was the choice to release way way way too early the right choice in the end? Needed telemetry, or even more time, to beat Google? Also taking the data from Google must have had significant ramifications.
Perhaps that is the case in the US, but in Poland, I haven't had a single app guide me into the literal bushes as many times as Apple Maps does. The straw that broke the camel's back was when, I shit you not, the navigation aspect literally expected me to drive through a lake.
However my biggest gripe with Apple Maps in Poland is that Siri does not understand Polish and cannot be told to navigate to a Polish address. It just can’t understand the street and city names :(
Btw: I haven’t counted the times Google Maps wanted me to go through the worst possible traffic jam (where the traffic jam was not visible on the map) or a closed road. I guess it just happens with every navigation system that errors happen.
The pronounciations, though, are indeed something that leaves no other option but to laugh. Expect "Rogozińska" (ruh-goh-tzeen-ska?), recieve something I fail to comprehend :-)
I tried using it in Bosnia, once, and it decided to use an abandoned airfield landing strip as a shortcut. Wild stuff.
I frequently drive through Serbia/Bulgaria/Montenegro/Macedonia, and if you ever do, do yourself a favor and install something OpenStreetMap-based.
Otherwise, you will be missing new motorways, get thrown on unpaved roads, or even asked to drive on roads that just do not exist anymore.
Google Maps is definitely still a little better but I find the delta is nowhere near as wide as it used to be. The main problem with Apple Maps I find today is that their data on business listings and locations tends to be a little older than Google’s, sometimes even a year or more out of date. So if a business or meeting place you’re trying to get to has moved recently you can wind up in the wrong spot.
Apple have been promising bicycle support in Canada since iOS 14. Bike paths and itineraries still aren't there.
It's the same with public transit, which is unsynchronized or unavailable depending on the city.
Apple Maps will show business informations and schedules, but only pull information from Yelp, which no one here uses. The app will guide you to businesses that have closed or moved out, and will show you photos and menus that date 5+ years.
It's not an issue of software quality unfortunately, but one of negligence on the service side.
to be frank, I have a feeling that Google has more / better data.
I haven’t come across anyone using Apple Maps while living in Japan, most seem to use Yahoo! Maps or Google Maps.
https://www.reddit.com/r/JapanTravel/comments/xbejr2/apple_m...
Noone in my circle with iphone uses it. Most of people are using Yahoo maps, which is way better than google and apple maps combined.
And they are planning to make it even worse with ads, so.
We might be kind of lucky in New Zealand with the yellow AA signposts at every intersection in the country telling you the nearest towns/communities and their distances in every direction.
Generally they are fine, but not literally in every aspect in every place, Europe or not.
Around here (Long Island, New York, USA), it’s better than Google Maps. I get to compare a lot, because I have a friend that uses GM, and constantly sends me Google Maps universal links.
I hear that it is a lot less effective in rural areas, though, and I think Google Street View is better than the Apple variant.
It drove me around a couple miles that went right back to the intersection where we started, and then wanted me to start the loop again.
Example: Taking the airport train instead of a private driver and realizing there’s no luggage racks, staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you. So many examples like that on a daily basis.
In a lot of cities, that’s either the fastest or the most comfortable way to go somewhere in the city when you come from the outside.
Not any single navigation app support this (tbf, the few European ones don’t support it either)
I think LLM's with access to lots of personal data and the ability to scout the web might solve all these use cases in one fell swoop, rather than trying to design a user interface with buttons, algorithms and data sources for every obscure use case.
I can assert than this isn't a thing in most Portuguese big cities, although it would be great to have it.
The's a metro ("S-Bahn") going north up to Friedberg/Hessen. Friedberg is the capital of the country. But there's no free "Park & Ride" there. Two stations towards Frankfurt you are in village called Wöllstadt. And there you have a free Park & Ride. More south some other village, no P&R. But then again in Bad Vilbel you have one.
Is however P&R + public tansport the fastest way to Frankfurt? That depends.
First, the Wöllstadt P&R isn't easily accessible from the Autobahn, or not even from the B3, which goes around Wöllstadt. And even when it went through it some years ago, it was several turn-left turn-rights through small streets.
And then the S6 only drives every 30 minutes to Frankfurt. It's supposed to change once they double the train tracks, but that will change. On top of it: metro lines don't have precedence, the quick trains like ICE have. So the S-Bahn more often than not waits until a faster train passes.
If it isn't between 7-9 in the morning, you're actually faster by car in Frankfurt than by public transport ... So the P&R is quite helpful for people living in the neighboring villages: they go by car to Wöllstadt, park there for free, commute to Frankfurt by metro. And that traffic jam free ... but not necessarily fast. And since parking in Frankfurt usually comes with a price tag, it's also a bit cheaper.
So it's nice to have this, but it's no all roses.
However compared with European countries like Portugal, this is a complete different reality.
This was my main point, because there are these "in Europe public transport is so great" remarks, yes it is, provided one is lucky to be on the right parts of Europe, as you also kind of refer to by your no all roses scenario.
To get to my home you take an exit off a toll road and where the exit splits continuing straight or going to the right you continue straight to a stop light where you take a left and in 1/4 mile take a right into my neighborhood. Apple Maps will tell you to go to the right instead of going straight merging on the road and continuing through 2 stop lights, taking a u-turn at a 3rd light and then backtracking to take the right into my neighborhood. Google Maps gives the correct directions.
In the closest major city Apple Maps will give directions instructing you to perform u-turns on streets where u-turns are legal but practically impossible. Google Maps will instead correctly direct you so such risky u-turns are not needed and you actually arrive quicker.
That is just two examples. I have many more I could provide.
I'll bite, what does this have to do with Apple Maps?
If it happens to be there, it will say to use it, but I can't say "Route me to the nearest HOV entrance" because I prefer it even if it's 1 minute slower.
And I know many engineers within Apple that had been testing Maps before it shipped and they were filing bugs about it. It shipped anyway.
“Real artists ship”
No product worth using is bug free.
This is not correct; "If a product is worth using, then it has bugs." (P→Q) does not imply its converse "If a product has bugs, then it is worth using." (Q→P). Buginess is presented as a necessary condition of being worth using, not a sufficient one.
It does, however, imply "If a product has no bugs, then it is not worth using.".
That was exactly my point. The presence of bugs in a product (in this case Apple Maps) does not mean it should not ship. “No open bugs” cannot be the criteria for whether a product is ready to ship.
I think you mean, should not.
That has not been my experience, I've got a Honda CB125F which uses Apple Maps for their on screen navigation.
I live in Lisbon and I wanted to Almada which is directly South from Lisbon. For reasons beyond me, Apple Maps kept telling me to go North and North and North, I tried restarting the navigation multiple times, but in the end I had to switch to Google Maps which did mean that I didn't have on screen navigation, only the audio ones, but at least it immediately told me to go South.
In my eyes, this is a critical failure.
I used to work to resolve addressing disputes and google just doesn't expose (maybe even store) the relevant information for a lot of parcels of land.
It’s all available freely from the government in simple formats but for Joe Public they don’t know that much less how to access it and it’s the case that technicians on the ground don’t always have it in their SOP either. Google has a level of market dominance that means their errors can be, for a small individual or over an aggregation of small individuals, costly.
"Straight" can be ambiguous, second exit isn't. Maybe it's because I'm terrible with directions and hate driving, but I like the constant feedback that I'm going the right way.
It just means nothing here except who you pay to collect the bins.
"Turn right on East one hundred and twenty three thousand South"
In general, for all it benefits from globalization, Apple disappoints on global markets.
If it weren't for that, I'd use Citymapper for practically everything.
> Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
While it is great now, it did flop because it was terrible.
Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.
I know between Moore's Law and Gate's Law which one I would prefer to be the industry standard... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
I don't think it means anything for this particular move; good leaders know what they know and what they don't know; they know how to motivate and select the right people, they know what to delegate and what to control. Having a track record of success of any kind is IMHO always the best start. I'm excited to see what kind of changes the transition from an operations person to a more technical leader may bring. Especially given how awesome Apple's hardware has consistently been.
Honestly, the thing that pushed me into software dev was the fact that hardware tools were absolutely garbage. Verilog felt like a joke of a language designed to torment rather than help the user.
It’s really amazing that at least there are some fully open flows for FPGAs these days, unfortunately they don’t support system Verilog. (I think this is still the case?)
I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.
I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.
It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.
They’ve coasted too long on consistent visual identity, and even that’s been slipping. Time to focus on actual user needs.
There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.
it's still not quite my tempo, looks downright silly in many places, but it has grown on me just a smidge, and i think i'd receive it a little better if it wasn't fundamentally more intensive to render. i think that's a line i can't respect and it feels like a step backwards.
i don't want to wax nostalgic about windows 98 era ui's or the design patterns i see with a lot of qt apps either, like they are imo kind of ugly to me too. but i appreciated the consistency back in the 98 era, and i think a ui that restored 3d beveled looking components, were somewhat expressive but consistent is what i want.
but the world is different now. things like flutter that give people a canvas and let them ground up their entire design language undoubtedly mean consistency can only exist within an entity's control, there likely will never be a unified agreed-upon set of ui standards that span industries and personal computing and different stacks anymore. kinda amusing that improved tooling and frameworks has just resulted in a wild west of user interface design.
Apple used to insist that different types of devices require different UI principles. This seems all the more true for a transparent device that you wear on your face while moving around trying not to bump into physical objects.
But we'll see. Perhaps the right level of transparency is situational. If you sit down with iGlasses using them as a screen you might want to reduce transparency while increasing it when you're moving around outdoors. Adjusting transparency could become as routine as adjusting audio volume.
I'm still on 18.x thats insecure by now and switching to Asahi as soon as something breaks.
and I’ve gotta say it: this is off-topic.
Post a link to a recent comment of someone using glasses as a display. That’s on topic.
Having blueprints and 3D models and info overlayed onto what you see in the real world can be very useful for farming, construction, infrastructure, and much more. Not to mention military application.
There are literally no PC laptops with the quality or hardware offered by even the cheapest MacBook - the software, while fine for general consumers, creators, and some developer workloads, tragically holds back its potential something fierce.
At the moment, I have a 2018 Mac Mini with a 12-core i7 and 64GB of RAM that is more limited in OS choice and hardware support than the 2012 Mac Mini sitting next to it, because the inner workings of the T2 chipset in particular and various other components have to be reverse-engineered bit by bit.
The only way Linux on Mac will become a reality is if it's legislated.
As for Windows on ARM, I'd bet that if Microsoft had managed to figure out their own product, Apple might have been tempted to support it. I mean why go through all the trouble of developing the most advanced firmware on the planet to support a fully secure macOS next to an unsecured OS if you do nothing with it?
That was totally up to Microsoft [1].
[1]: "Craig Federighi: Native Windows on M1 Macs is 'Really up to Microsoft'" — https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-wind...
If I play devil's advocate, the only reason I could think of is that supporting Linux signals to investors that Apple is offering a key to bypass their API moat, perhaps sacrificing a longer term vision of vendor lock-in.
By contrast, I can imagine investors would get upset if the iPhone had an unlocked bootloader and allowed Android to be installed - but that's because the App Store is a significant revenue stream for Apple. I don't think there is a parallel on MacOS that investors could point to as being upsetting.
If anything, optional support for Linux would lift the market cap for Mac hardware as it would close the only pull that other laptop vendors previously enjoyed.
In reality though, just like is historically true, 99% of people would continue to use MacOS. Only SWEs, enthusiasts, gamers and some number of Windows refugees would pick Linux.
Though I am 100% behind legislating Linux support - EU are you listening?
There were a couple of people (the Asahi team) that made this work for M1, but as I understand it, the effort has stalled since. This just goes to show how few people truly care.
If they wanted to go out of their way, they could spend a weekend writing Linux drivers - Apple have written Windows drivers in the past, so it's not unprecedented.
I believe the real hurdle is that Linux doesn't do well with modular (closed source) drivers. Unlike Windows, drivers can't practically be added to a kernel, they must be compiled into it.
Apple would not want to make their drivers open source or so they would want to distribute their drivers as binary blobs.
That would necessitate either maintaining an Apple-fork of the Linux kernel with their drivers hidden within it, or contributing shims to upstream Linux + binary blob drivers.
If they wanted to help, the bare minimum would be to publish documentation on their hardware so drivers could be written without reverse engineering from schematics and microscope photos.
Most people just want to sit down and eat a nice meal. They don't want to go through all the difficult back breaking work of farming, animal husbandry or fishing/hunting to eat.
That is how I look at people writing OS drivers and core components. It's boring back breaking work no one wants to think about. People pine for it, even romanticize about it. But the fact is that it's dirty annoying work and I have never heard anyone thanking the farmer for the meal they just ate. Yet we still have farmers. Few, yet they exist.
Just because a few people stepped away from the project doesn't mean there are plenty of other developers working hard every day on this.
The Mac has never been more popular in its 40 year history than it is now. The recently released MacBook Neo broke all previous Mac sales records. Needing to sell more Macs isn't an issue these days.
Apple's Mac revenue last fiscal year was $33.7 billion. I suspect the number of Linux users that might buy a Mac if it could run Linux natively is probably in rounding error territory.
Apple has been around for 50 years and has a market-cap of around $4 trillion. All without supporting Linux. I think they're okay with that.
Linux on Mac is absolutely a reality [1], and Apple specifically supported it by deliberately leaving a documented/supported mechanism for another OS kernel to be loaded.
Linux on Apple Silicon is not a reality on my M5 Pro. I run Asahi on my M1 Pro, but I cannot use my USB-C dock with it and, while amazing, cannot practically use the GPU for gaming or local LLMs.
This limits my ability to practically use it for work and play.
Using the App Store is optional on the Mac.
They will not. Recognizing the value of power users and engineers looks deeply un-Apple to me.
No offense to Lenovo, it's a great laptop. But Apples build quality is on another level, plus if I want to run local LLMs, AFAIK there is no better option.
There's no way I'm going back to macOS though, that shit was bad 5 years ago when I switched and it sounds like it's gotten way worse.
At work I have an M4Max 128G, and it's hard to beat that amount of compute, with that build quality.
Not being able to feel that it's turned on is basically the primary feature of a laptop for me. I've wanted to switch my personal device to linux for a while, but there just... isn't... one. I know I could run linux on the macbook, but the point here is that there is nothing which compares, not even at higher prices.
Right to repair with aftermarket parts and app installs from any source without Apple's permission. Then I'll consider using an iPhone.
The advances that made Apple Silicon possible were, fundamentally, TSMC and ARM. These were the material conditions that had to exist in order for a tech company to capitalize on a new generation of vertically integrated chip design. Now what's the conditions for next generation Mac OS? What research advances or software engineering paradigms that are mature enough for adoption? The state of Apple software isn't just due to mismanagement, it is, but the success of the hardware entails technology nodes as a confounding factor.
Since 26 upgrade it is unusable with 100+ notes. It looks like they merged iOS variant with Macos one. Constant freezes, random unsaves, device gets boiling hot. No fix with factory reset. I love the HW but SW needs more love.
It's not that the hardware is horrible, but I think if it weren't for the ecosystem and chips most Apple products would seem quite unremarkable.
The main reason I haven’t purchased a Vision Pro is they have all sorts of glass on the front. I live alone and don’t need to share my eyes with an empty room, and even I did I would rather have a screen I could control to make a funny mask with. That screen is a step too far with not giving users control.
But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
Apple has always been a "our way or the highway" brand, we can at least keep in mind that 3 laptop formulas only differenciated by size and thickness won't cut it for everyone on the planet.
Sports motorcycles used to be for people who care about motorcycles. Breakdowns, unsafe, finicky, tuning the carburetor if you went between mountains and sea level. You didn't just get on it and go. You had to know about motorcycles if you were an owner. And each individual model had their individual quirks.
Which option is better?
Glossy screens, crappy keyboards, sharp edges, large weight are all single, terrible choices that one has to accept, manage or tune (there was recently a blog post shared where someone files edges on their MacBook; you constantly need to position yourself so light sources are not pointing at the screen...).
They have their good sides, but I am disagreeing that they are the ultimate laptops when they so clearly aren't.
While I see your point, that's not the reality of mac laptops to my eyes.
The stupidest example: I just want to play Steam games. Will they work on my mac? who knows, probably not.
Other basic stuff: can I 2FA without owning any other Apple device ? What happens if I owned an iPhone but switched to android ? etc.
"it just works" stopped being true for a pretty long time now IMHO.
I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.
As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.
What about gestures, like two-finger scroll, or two-finger hold+click right click?
If there's a trackpad as well (usually there is), you can still do all the multi-finger gestures on it unless you choose to disable the trackpad altogether.
Fwiw, I don't find the trackpoint faster or more precise than the giant MacBook trackpads. Its main advantages are being closer to your index fingers' likely resting position on the keyboard, physical mouse buttons, and requiring less vertical space than a giant trackpad.
I was never a trackpad person until I finally got a Mac at work maybe 10 years ago. But since the trackpads stopped really clicking in favor of haptics, they're a lot worse than they used to be. I get false/double clicks and inconsistent feedback.
ThinkPads have nicer keyboards, but they stopped doing the more traditional IBM layout several years ago, which is really unfortunate. I'd be willing to pay for a more traditional keyboard layout with a slightly smaller trackpad and/or a sizeable bottom bezel (which is actually preferable for me because of my posture when I use a laptop most of the time).
I’ve worked in big tech and fast growing startups, side by side at one point or another next to hundreds of nerds that love talking about hardware and software
The touchpad is almost universally loved - I have never ever once her anyone complain about the click - most people didn’t even notice the switch
It has 3D Touch and all that and I’ve never gotten a false click - ever - not exaggerating, in however long they’ve been out
The only complaint I’ve ever heard more than once is that sometimes it takes a second to respond
So I ask you: how do you use your laptop? If no one else complains about this, it’s at least worth asking the question: what do you think you’re doing differently than everybody else?
> But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.
Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.
As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.
Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.
I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.
OTOH, I want subpixel rendering on my big screens, and you can't have it with a Mac.
hardware - afaik only lenovo(some say asus is worth to try - but no official linux support, framework is sturdy but feels cheap) is well know for quality hardware - others are questionable.
unfortunately AMD AI Max 390/2/5+ nor Qualcomm Elite 2 Lenovos are not here.
it kind of 'just works' if someone already wrote the nix code to do what you want it to do and put it in nixpkgs and you manage to find it and figure out how to use it. but if that isn't the case, good luck. i once spent almost a week trying to get a program to build and run properly under nix that could probably be installed in around 20 seconds on a osx/windows machine.
The quality of the managed / packages software, however, is still a bit subpar compared to Debian and Redhat.
2. nix is just package manager and configurator of sh which forces to write idempotent sh code with explicit dependencies(just good practices right? check guidelines of any non nix solutions and you will find out that 90% of these rules are just nix). nixos, nix darwin, nix home manager final artifacts are just just idiomatic dotfiles, so nix does not exist.
There's also software component. It has improved by now, but early libinput was giving some good trackpads bad rep.
Bertrand Serlet, Avie Tevanian, Scott Forstall were all great with software directions.
Craig feels like a people pleaser. Which may be great for modern or current Silicon Valley where everything has a softer approach. But pleasing everyone means there is no unity and direction. Software stack that is less cohesive.
I still to this day do not believe Swift is the right path, in both technical and philosophical approach.