So I updated to iOS 6 last night around eleven, half paying attention to a rerun, and this morning I got to find out in real time what everybody's been complaining about since yesterday: Apple ripped out Google Maps and replaced it with their own thing, and their own thing is not ready.
I want to be fair here because I know how this goes: new maps app, everybody panics, six months later nobody remembers caring. But this morning was rough. I take the 47 bus to get anywhere near downtown, and the old Maps app would just tell me which bus, which stop, when the next one came. Gone. No transit directions at all in the new one. You tap the bus icon and it kicks you out to a list of third-party apps in the App Store, none of which I have installed, none of which I particularly want to install at 8:15 on a Thursday when I'm trying to figure out if I have four minutes or fourteen to get to the corner of Mass Ave.
So I just walked it. Twenty minutes, coffee in hand, mildly annoyed the whole way.
The other stuff is smaller but it adds up. I searched for a hardware store I use all the time and it dropped the pin two blocks off, on top of what I'm pretty sure is somebody's actual house. The 3D flyover view, which is genuinely a cool party trick when it works, turned a parking garage near my apartment into something that looked like a lump of wet clay. Buildings with no texture, edges that don't quite meet. It's neat tech and I get why they're proud of it, but "neat tech" and "thing I trust to get me somewhere at night" are different bars.
None of this is a surprise if you were paying attention. Apple's been building this since they bought a couple of mapping companies a few years back, and everyone assumed day one wouldn't be perfect. Fine. But Google Maps on the iPhone wasn't a beta, it was mature, it had years of data and transit info baked in, and now it's just gone unless you load the website in Safari, which is what I ended up doing for the rest of the morning like it's 2009 again.
The rest of iOS 6 is actually pretty good, for what it's worth, and I don't want this to read like I hate the whole update. Passbook is one of those things I didn't know I wanted — I loaded a boarding pass into it just to see it work, even though I'm not flying anywhere until November — and Facebook being woven into the OS the way Twitter was last year is a small thing but a nice one, one less app to open. Siri answering sports scores and doing restaurant bookings is neat too, though I don't really use Siri for much beyond timers and being annoyed at it mishearing me.
Bigger picture, this is obviously happening because Friday's the iPhone 5 launch and Apple wanted their new flagship phone running their own map software instead of paying Google for the privilege and sending them all that location data. Makes sense from a business standpoint. I preordered mine the day it opened, which sold out in under an hour apparently, and my shipping estimate has already slipped into October, so I've got a while yet to sit with the current phone and this half-finished Maps app before the new hardware even shows up.
One small complaint totally unrelated to any of this: my building's wifi has been dropping every couple hours for like a week now and I still haven't called the ISP about it because I hate being on hold more than I hate a spotty connection, which tells you something about how much I hate being on hold.
Anyway. If you haven't updated yet and you rely on transit directions to get anywhere, maybe hold off a few days, or at least grab a transit app first so you're not stranded like I was this morning. If you're mostly a driver, the turn-by-turn stuff is actually solid and the voice guidance is nicer than what Google had. It's a mixed bag. I'll probably feel differently about all of it in a month.