Maybe not! The last half of the article is all about the faults; the closing line of the article (before footnotes) questions whether or not Apple is making the

Maybe not! The last half of the article is all about the faults; the closing line of the article (before footnotes) questions whether or not Apple is making the right maps at all. And the footnotes are relentlessly negative about Apple: "These building height regressions are surprising because they contradict TechCrunch’s claim that Apple’s buildings are now 'more accurate'." "Consider that just two years after it started adding algorithmically extracted buildings to its map, Google had already added the majority of the U.S.’s buildings. But after four years, Apple has only added buildings in 64% of California and 9% of Nevada." "All of this new detail is not without cost. In many areas, Apple Maps’s roads are now harder to see than before." "Part of the reason why Yelp’s place database is so much smaller than Google’s is because Yelp is largely focused on businesses with consumer-facing storefronts. And you can see the consequences of this on Apple’s map, especially with government-related places." "Or maybe the issue is that Apple’s extraction algorithms just aren’t as good as Google’s yet?" "Another advantage of the Local Guides program is that Google owns everything that’s contributed, including all of the photos." "For instance, here’s the Six Flags Great America theme park that’s just seven miles away from Apple’s headquarters." (With a shot of Great America lacking detail in Apple's map.) "It’s odd that Apple refuses to track trip start/end points but sees nothing wrong with mapping tennis and baskball courts in people’s backyards." "It’s almost as if Google is saying this is now a map of destinations—all of the places it’ll be able to take you to, someday soon." "I think Google’s ambitions here run far deeper than being just another Yelp or Foursquare. If you zoom out on everything Google is doing, you see the makings of a much larger, end-to-end travel platform." It's kind of interesting -- it's as if halfway through he forgot that he was writing about improvements in Apple's mapping and decided he was writing about the promise of Google's mapping as a new kind of platform. But either way, this is a classic rhetoric. It's the bit where you praise a specific thing to the skies, then pull back and reveal how in the big picture that thing doesn't matter so much. Note that I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm just saying that this is not, over all, an article that praises Apple.