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Apple Will Use Drones To Improve the Quality of Apple Maps (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple plans to use drones and new indoor navigation features to improve its Maps service and catch longtime leader Google (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternate link), according to people familiar with the matter. The Cupertino, California-based company is assembling a team of robotics and data-collection experts that will use drones to capture and update map information faster than its existing fleet of camera-and-sensor ladened minivans, one of the people said. Apple wants to fly drones around to do things like examine street signs, track changes to roads and monitor if areas are under construction, the person said. The data collected would be sent to Apple teams that rapidly update the Maps app to provide fresh information to users, the person added. Apple is also developing new features for Maps, including views inside buildings and improvements to car navigation, another person familiar with the efforts said. Apple filed for an exemption on Sept. 21, 2015, from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly drones for commercial purposes, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg News. At that time, exemptions were required to commercially operate drones. In a response dated March 22, 2016, the FAA granted Apple approval to "operate an unmanned aircraft system to conduct data collection, photography, and videography," according to one of the documents. Apple's application told the FAA that it would use a range of drones sold by companies such as SZ DJI Technology Co. and Aibotix GmbH to collect the data. Apple has hired at least one person from Amazon's Prime Air division to help run the drone team, one of the people said.
They don't have the engineering talent to catch up to Google's lead on maps or siri or anything else that doesn't involve making thinner phones.
... hundreds of millions of phones which act as sensors and they need some drones???
over-paid executives are idiots
Doesn't Apple need to develop it's own line of drones first?
NIH is deeply entrenched in Apple culture.
*Ahem*! They prefer to be called "cartographers".
spiDrones
... will they need?
There are construction projects going on all over hell's half an acre at any one given time.
Apple needs to do R&D on their core products. They have way too much cash to be re-inventing the wheel.
This sounds like the cluster-fuck Microsoft is having with smart phones -- too late to the party and they didn't even bring the ice.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
They don't have the engineering talent to catch up to Google's lead on maps
Apple maps at the outset did not have as good base data as Google. But even then it gave better directions than Google did - it directed me to my house via the route I already drove already because I knew it was the bast (that's the best way to judge map apps, but asking for directions for places you already know well and seeing if you agree).
Nowadays Apple maps data is every bit as good as Google has, and I would say they repair errors found much faster than Google. The past five incidents I've reported (bad roads or wrong information about places) I received a notification that the errors had been corrected in a day or two.
Apple also has surpassed Google in transit directions, offering directions that include how to go through the station...
Google may have started a lot earlier but you are totally forgetting the funk and lethargy that large organizations fall into over time. Apple has a very different corporate structure that is letting the Apple Maps team advance much faster than Google has been improving...
Apple may not be ahead with Siri but I don't think they are that far behind either. What makes you think Google has engineering chops no-one else does? The massive successes of Google Plus or Hangouts?? They are both pretty much at the start of a very, very long race there and it is anyone's game...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's obviously just another fanciful bullshit marketing stunt and or goals of some deluded executive.
I'm sure Apple's R&D are aware of more practical, useful, and accurate solutions available by leveraging their iPhone footprint and other device footprints.
lol Sure...
You think such a wealthy company can't be destroyed ? I submit the example of General Motors.
The iPhone used to be far more useful than it is now. Apple deliberately crippled local sync,
most likely in an effort to coerce users toward using iCloud. Well now, if you know much
about iCloud, that mess is something best avoided because it still doesn't work properly.
And people smart enough to avoid using iCloud are left without the functions of sync, which
was once one of the more compelling reasons to buy into the Apple "ecosystem".
And then there are the new "Macbook Pro" laptops, which are cheapened crap compared to the
previous generation of Macbook Pros. Don't get me started on how much less worthwhile the new
machines are than the previous ones, it's like comparing single-malt scotch with Dewar's.
Listen, Tim Cook : there are a lot of smart people in the world and many of them don't take orders from you.
You're making Apple products worse and if you continue this trend I have bought my last phone and laptop
from you. And I am far from alone in this sentiment. Your fundamental mistake is and has been IGNORING THE
NEEDS AND WANTS OF THE PAYING CUSTOMER. And you're goddamned right I am yelling. Your incompetence
pisses me off and the shit products you are pushing out the door make me want to puke.
The word on the street is that Apple execs are shitting bricks of the cost inflection points for mobile design. That's why they pushed out the iWatch, even though many were dubious about the sanity. They have this internal war going between the folks who want to become an exclusive "Swiss Watch" type company - except one that makes really expensive high end stuff. The other camp wants to be more of a consumer focused, less elite company.
On the handset front, they know a $50 handset can do everything 90% of people want to do. 90% of people don't care if a camera is 38 megapixels or 19 megapixels as long as the photos they take are "good enough". The iPhone ecosystem is already a dead man walking. They could build a $50 retail handset, but they lose the margins they are used to, and irreparably tarnish the brand. It's the same thing that happened to IBM. Yes, Apple has a shit-tonne of cash, but IBM was also similarly in a stellar position before the great fall.
The fear is palpable in certain discussions. Nobody really likes discussing it honestly, because it scares everyone so much. Like him or hate him, Steve Jobs was a master marketeer. Jobs could take dog-shit, put it in a sleek box and sell it as perfume. Everyone knows that Tim isn't the same. Jobs created markets, even with shitty products. Look at the original Mac. It was a joke. But he created a market for it. Same with the original NeXT boxes. They were dog slow.
So the real question is can Tim somehow avoid going down the route Sculley did. There is no Steve to ressurrect the brand if Tim fucks things up like Sculley did.
Uh huh. Sure.
The drone isn't going to help with the problems Apple Maps has. The map data is fairly complete these days. Its problems are:
1. Search
2. Traffic
3. Directions
Searching for locations works the majority of the time. But it's still not uncommon to get results randomly across the country, if not in another country entirely.
Traffic in iOS 10 is much improved: it now has some basis in reality. Not generally the current reality, but maybe as recently as 12 hours ago.
Directions are worthless in iOS. Despite knowing where an address is, despite knowing all the roads between the start and finish, Apple Maps will still send you someplace else. Usually it gets the route right (even if it's based on traffic from yesterday), but sometimes - sometimes it just sends you somewhere else.
And no amount of drones is going to fix any of that. Well, I suppose they could use drones to improve the traffic reports. But that's not what they're planning on doing.
The word on the street is
Among the homeless?
if a drone came in your yard without an invite could you keep it for dissection and experiments?
..and by drones it means the user base....
Google is light years ahead of apple, i don't know why people still use apple maps
The more of these stupid go-nowhere projects Apple engages in, the fast they burn through the money reserve keeping them safe. Apple has become a dead end without Steve Jobs.
How long until the first iDrone strikes beging? They'll start by taking out, the most vocal critics of the Apple Universe (Appleverse). Before long anyone holding a non-iDevice will risk being a target. Apple won't seek to establish a monopoly on the business side, but will on the buyer side. Nobody will dare touch anything else. ;)
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
I'm in a major North American city and Google maps has almost no data on the construction in town. Some of it weeks after it began.
I also don't trust Google maps for traffic. They seem to mark a route "Red" as heavy traffic faster than Apple maps, to the point that I ignore their statements on traffic density... the roads are usually not as bad as they say they are.
Apple maps are quicker to read, faster to load, give me better traffic. OpenStreetmap gives me better detail on streets, walking paths, geography and cycling paths. Google maps are better than all of these at finding addresses, and nobody has anything better than Google Streetview.
We can't forget that Apple is making money, and a lot of money, selling phones. You're paying for that mapping sofware. Google is an advertising company, they make money selling your location and other information about you. The privacy reasons keep my feet out of Google as much as possible, but the alternatives have advantages.
It's not the quality of the maps that makes Google better than Apple. It's the simple matter of understanding that context-sensitive searches are essential to a good "map experience". If you search on Google Maps for a place, business, or business type; you get results for that immediate area. On Apple Maps, the search returned could be on the other side of the planet, as I found out, searching for "soup dumplings" in the middle of Chinatown, San Francisco. Apple Maps returned a location in Taiwan. Google Maps returned a place around the corner.
My UID is prime!
Searching for locations works the majority of the time. But it's still not uncommon to get results randomly across the country
That happens sometimes but it also happens in Google Maps.
Apple maps is still better for searching though. Try a search for "Arby's" - Apple maps zooms out to a view at city scale with the map taking up 3/4 of the screen, he two closest results in text at the bottom. Google maps zooms out to city scale too, but in a map that takes up the top 1/5 of the screen, basically unreadable - then has a list of arbors with distances and addresses, but you can't really tell which ones are nearby or which directions the ones on the list are unless you are familiar with the app...
Apple Maps traffic in Denver seems every bit as good as Google maps. Both are inferior to Waze though, which is pretty amusing since Waze is owned by Google...
I've never had an issue with Apple Maps giving me bad directions, across most the the US. (I've driven coast to coast).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's the difference between Apple and Google. Apple respect users privacy.