Apple Maps has rapidly become a bigger joke in technology than RIM, and that’s saying something. Whether it’s a Tumblr making fun of its inaccuracies, or just the fact that it’s become part of every hacky comedian’s repetoire, it’s a rare misstep for a company not noted for making them.
So why did it happen? Why did Apple do it? Why did they make such a blatant misstep and release a product that so obviously was not ready?
Theories have ranged from a legal argument to Apple just being all Regina George towards Google (or vice versa), but some nerds have compared the two and come up with what’s actually a pretty good answer.
According to Onavo, a company that gets the most out of your data plan, it’s because Google Maps is a data hog:
Our data experts performed an identical series of activities on Google Maps and Apple Maps that included searching for several US cities, addresses and airports and zooming in and out to locate specific locations. On Google Maps, the average data loaded from the cellular network for each step was 1.3MB. Apple Maps came in at 271KB
OK, and Apple cares because…?
Because when the iPhone first came into existence, unlimited data plans were fairly common among cellular providers. Now they’re an endangered species. In fact, everybody from Apple’s main providers of the iPhone, AT&T and Verizon, now has a limit on their data, since to American corporations, data is like oil or Beer Nuts or some other physical quantity. So, the more data an app burns, the less data is available for that customer to buy and download more apps.
So, really, it was greed. Just greed of an entirely different kind.