tjwolf

The meme that Apple Maps is inferior to Google Maps is getting pretty tiring after 5 years - especially since in some (many?) cases it's actually not true anymore.  If I had to rate the two on pure (map data) accuracy, Google is still slightly ahead (most annoyingly, Google is still much faster in updating its maps when a flaw is reported - I know this from personal experience having reported a missing road to both companies).  Navigation wise, they're about equal and, to me at least, Apple Maps of late seems to have the edge on the currency of traffic data (on several trips now, Google still showed traffic congestion when Apple Maps already reflected a 'green' reality).  Google Maps sometimes picks better routes - Apple's estimate of remaining time to destination is more spot-on.

During navigation, Apple Maps is far superior to Google Maps in battery conservation.  The former almost never causes my phone to run hot - the latter almost always - i.e., Google Maps sucks my battery dry at a much faster clip.

Where Apple Maps is still much weaker than Google Maps is in searches for businesses or points of interest.  There are still many cases when Google Maps finds what I'm looking for after Apple Maps give me nothing.

good article - thanks for the explanation.

The reasons you gave are all probably valid, but the gaming market, as vast as it seems to be at $90b, isn't very big when it comes to Apple's potential part in it.   Let's say Apple did decide to enter the gaming market with its own hardware - it would certainly have to be new h/w as Apple wouldn't be so stupid as to lower the margins on all its iPhones just to satisfy the needs of what would be a pretty tiny number of users, relatively speaking.  Let's say it's some super-duper controller into which the iPhone or an iPad would slide in order to give it more gaming creds.  In the markets Apple participates in, it usually doesn't own more than 10%.  I don't know what the market size for gaming hardware is, so I'll just take 10% of the $90b you gave for the entire gaming market - that's a meager (by Apple standards) $9b!  Apple makes over $200b per year.  It's current App store alone makes more  than $9b.  Heck, by now I bet the Apple Watch generates more than $9b/year.

In other words, the additional business is just not worth Apple's time.

Love these article - the existence of the "Titan" project was never really substantiated with real evidence.  Now, that the also rumored self-driving car doesn't seem to be materializing, "Titan" is supposedly taking a back-seat to this new AR effort.  Not much has changed either....instead of supposedly putting hundreds of engineers behind self-driving cars, they're now put behind commercializing AR....

Not saying AR isn't a priority at Apple.  Just that these rumor mills posing as 'news' by naming unsubstantiated and often unnamed "sources" contribute to the increasing mistrust towards real news.

"benchmarks we've listed in the chart are pulled from the iPhone SE which has an A9 processor running at 1.8 GHz. The 2017 iPad is said to run at 1.85 Ghz, so we're not expecting a major difference from that, but there may be other factors involved".  Well, graphics for one, no?  an iPad has to push a lot more pixels than an iPhone SE.