I did not stand in line for an iPhone 5 on Friday. I thought about it around 6am when I saw the first Instagram photos from the Apple Store on Walnut Street, decided my current 4S is fine for now, and went back to sleep. Sorry to disappoint anyone hoping for an "I waited eleven hours and here's what it's like" post. Plenty of other people already wrote that post, probably better than I would have.
What I did do is update to iOS 6 on Wednesday night, mostly for the Passbook thing (which I have literally not used once) and because I'm the kind of person who installs a software update the second it shows up, even at 11pm on a work night. Which is how I ended up spending part of Thursday, and pretty much all of Saturday, fighting with the new Maps app instead of using it.
Quick background for anyone who somehow missed this one: Apple pulled Google's mapping data out of iOS 6 and replaced it with their own thing, built partly on data licensed from TomTom. No more Google Maps app preinstalled, no more transit directions built in either, you're supposed to go find a separate app for that now (iOS actually pops up a little dialog suggesting you download one), and a shiny new "Flyover" 3D mode that is, I'll admit, genuinely neat when it works.
Here's the thing though. I was trying to find a specific pizza place off Route 30 that I know exists, because I've eaten there, more than once, with actual dollars. Typed the name in, hit search, and Maps very confidently routed me to a spot about four miles away that turned out to be a cornfield. Not near a cornfield. In it. My phone told me, with total sincerity, that I had arrived at my destination.
That's not a one-off either. A friend of mine, who did wait in the iPhone 5 line Friday morning, six hours, walked out with the 32GB in white for $299 on contract, sent me a screenshot Saturday night of a bridge near his apartment rendered in Flyover mode looking like it had melted in the sun, all warped and drooping like something out of a Dali painting. Genuinely funny to look at. Less funny if you're actually trying to navigate somewhere after dark.
I get why Apple did this, to be fair. Google was never going to keep handing over turn-by-turn voice navigation to a competitor's phone forever, not once Android existed, and Apple clearly didn't want to stay dependent on a rival for something that central. That's a reasonable business call. But shipping it to hundreds of millions of phones before the underlying data was actually good is a different decision, and I think it's the wrong one. Getting your own maps out the door in time for a keynote slide isn't really a customer-first move, it's a competitive one, and this week that showed.
For now I've just bookmarked the Google Maps website on my home screen, which runs fine in Safari, no App Store required, and still gives me real transit directions for the trolley. Not elegant. Gets the job done until somebody builds something better.
I still think the iPhone 5 itself looks great, for what it's worth. The taller screen, the weight of it (someone let me hold theirs at a coffee shop Sunday, it's ridiculously light compared to the 4S) mean I'll probably upgrade before the year's out, contract permitting. I'm just in no hurry to hand my daily commute over to an app that thinks a cornfield is a pizzeria. Apple usually fixes this kind of thing eventually. They're just doing it in public this time, with the rest of us as the beta testers.