An unhappy apple user, not a myth

Dear Mr. Cooks,

I write this letter to inform you about my recent, not so great experience, with a device which many people love, and I do too. As you may have guessed by now, this is indeed about the infamous Apple maps that you shipped with the latest iOS update, and as reiterated by many, they do need some serious work.

I understand you have may have already heard many complaints and are probably not interested in hearing any further criticism. I will try to make it as interesting as I can, by conveying it as a short story, and by keeping the criticism to the minimum.

Just to give you some background about me, i’m just a normal guy who believes in perfect balance. I believe scarcity and abundance are both equally harmful, and so are harmony and conflict; beauty is in striking the right balance between the two extremes. I also love my gadgets. I bought my first iPhone in 2009 and ever since did not use any other phone, have had two versions of the phone until now, and counting. I’m also a patient man, but I don’t like to wait a lot. So it is natural that I never liked the google maps application that shipped with iPhones, up until now. I was pretty excited to hear about the new apple maps, during the recent iOS launch. As always, I upgraded my iPhone firmware the day it was released out of curiosity. The substantial speed upgrade; 3-D view; turn-by-turn navigation, directions and just the overall experience of the maps amazed me. But it wasn’t long lasted and I did hear some criticism, which I conveniently ignored. I never used the app heavily to its full potential up until now, so I had nothing to complain about and to join the critic bandwagon nor to defend the app.

Coming back to my story my wife and I went on a break to Florida. We checked-in at the hotel, freshened up and thought of going for dinner, we searched for the nearest restaurant and left. I forgot a crucial travel companion - the GPS - at the hotel, and I noticed it later, when we were already out of the hotel parking lot. I said to my wife “don’t worry honey, I have my iPhone”, I was thinking “the restaurant isn’t too far, what could possibly go wrong?”. I fired the app, cross verified the address on apple maps with google to ensure they tallied, and headed in the direction of the restaurant. As we got close to the destination which was supposed to be on my right, I started looking for signs of the place. But surprise surprise, we were greeted by some bushes and trees and a closed building which I couldn’t clearly see as it was dark. I tried hard to smell falafels, but in vain. What was strange too was that we were at the exact location as marked on the app, which was next to a TGI Friday’s; but for some reason the app couldn’t detect that we had arrived. It kept trying to navigate me to the right place, which was exactly where we were, made no sense until later. After going back and forth making a few U-Turns, we just stopped and called the restaurant, asked for directions from where we were located. Another surprise, the restaurant was right across the street from where the App originally navigated us to. Seems like a simple error, right? The app had the street numbers messed up. May be, though it did show TGI Friday’s correctly. Anyway, I just ignored the extra 15 minutes it took me and the tussle between me and my wife on who was responsible, and enjoyed our dinner; at least it brought us close enough. I was still a happy I got my falafels for dinner.

The next couple of days are not so important for this conversation, we did have a lot of fun, I will spare you from the commentary. One night, we decided to go to the Disney Marketplace, for dinner and some fun. My wife had a spa treatment and I had a massage and spent the day resting, so we thought, we should catch some action. This time I had my GPS on me, but I couldn’t find the location correctly; it was dark outside and was thus not easy to follow the information signs on the road, and also this was our first time to Disney; it is quite easy to locate the Marketplace otherwise. Thus, I quickly searched on my iPhone again, putting my faith in a product that had already failed me once. I guess it still hadn’t crossed the threshold of my patience the last time. Anyway, after driving for a while we arrived at a parking gate/booth where the security person asked me “How may I help you.” I said “I want to go the Disney Marketplace”. He said “That should be fine” and asked the lady next to him if we could. She said, “sure, but you are headed in the opposite direction, the marketplace is 6 miles behind you, so turn around, go straight and you can park in Lot 2 or 3”. She looked at my iPhone and said “yeah they usually mess up the addresses around here”, I think she meant most GPS’s, but I didn’t think of confirming what she meant. So we did what we were told, and just to hedge my bets, I also had maps.google.com open my iPhone browser with the exact same address. And yes we finally found the place just following those simple directions. Along the way my wife revealed her frustration, and I agreed to what she said. I wondered, “Apple, how could you do this to me?”. My wife actually started comparing Tim Cooks and Steve Jobs, and that we should write to Tim Cooks.

So here I am, writing to you. What is the moral of the story? Well I have two key takeaways: First off, both the times it was a human that saved us and directed us to the right location, I guess we could deduce that a normal human being exceeds the capabilities of an Apple product; I know, this maybe far fetched. Secondly, I used to believe "An unhappy apple user is a myth" but I wonder if that is still true. I have always been amazed by Apple and your products, and i’m sure many others are, they have transformed our generation and set a new bar for perfection. I also just finished reading Steve Jobs’ biography and I loved it, talks to the culture inside Apple, some of which may have changed since you took over, in a good way. But I still wonder, if I had two such encounters on such a short trip, how many other Apple fans are experiencing such problems? how much is it frustrating them? and finally, what is Apple doing about it?

Best Regards,

Just another Apple fan.