The dust is still settling from WWDC, and yeah, I'm going to say it: the Maps thing really matters more than people think.
Everybody's focused on the shiny stuff: Passbook (which is neat but probably going to take years to actually matter), Siri coming to iPad, the retina MacBook Pro with the new Ivy Bridge chips. But buried in there is something that fundamentally changes how Apple works. They're building their own Maps app from the ground up. They're not licensing Google Maps anymore. They're stepping out of Google's shadow.
This isn't a small decision. For years, iOS just had Google Maps baked in. It was good, it worked, and frankly, why would Apple waste resources building their own when Google already had the best mapping product on the planet? But Apple looked at that arrangement and decided it wasn't enough. They wanted control. They wanted the data. They wanted the relationship with users.
I get why, and I'm honestly torn on this. On one hand, I respect the move toward independence. Apple's been pushing Siri, pushing iCloud, pushing their own services stack. Maps was the last major Google service deeply embedded in iOS, and letting Google own that relationship meant letting Google know everywhere you went, every search you did on Maps. That's data Apple doesn't have. From a company perspective, it's maddening.
But here's the thing that's bothering me: I tried the new Maps app, and it's rough. I mean, it's functional, and some of the vector graphics stuff looks beautiful, but the underlying data just isn't there yet. There are obvious missing pieces in the databases. Places I know exist aren't there. Addresses are wrong. The satellite imagery looks weirdly blurry in some areas. Apple's going to get crushed in the tech blogs for this, and honestly, they deserve it for launching something that feels so clearly unfinished.
The real problem is timing. Apple's got momentum with iOS—the iPad Retina display, the MacBook Pro with Retina, all the momentum they're building—and they're confident enough now to say no to Google. Which, fine. But they should have waited until their Maps product was actually ready. Maybe iOS 7. Maybe next year. Right now, in June 2012, this feels premature.
What gets me is the arrogance of it, kind of. Apple can afford to mess this up. They've got a billion users. If Maps sucks for a year, most people will eventually get used to it. Google Maps users will grumble and switch to a third-party app, but they'll come back because it's baked into the OS. That's the whole point. But for early adopters and power users who actually rely on good mapping data? We're the test subjects now.
The other hardware stuff from WWDC feels incremental, honestly. The Retina MacBook Pro is faster, the screen is insanely sharp, and it's thin. Fine. I want one. But it's not revolutionary. The iPad getting Siri is nice but feels half-baked too. Passbook is interesting as a concept: digital receipts, airline boarding passes, tickets, all in one place. But adoption's going to be glacially slow.
The Maps decision, though. That's the real story here. That's Apple saying "we're not just a hardware company anymore, and we're not comfortable relying on Google for core services." It's ambitious. It's also a little reckless. We'll see how it plays out, but my gut says early adopters are going to have a rough summer with this.