“As Apple pushes out an update to iOS 6 maps to remove the now-notorious ‘desert Mildura,’ I'm going to sound an unusual note of fairness to Cupertino for the mistake,” Richard Chirgwin reports for The Register.
“It wasn't actually Apple's fault,” Chirgwin reports. “It looked bad compared to Google Maps, because the Chocolate Factory has spent an awful lot of money, time and petrol on StreetView and other ways to improve the "ground truth" of its maps - but Apple hasn't yet had the chance to correct the data it uses as inputs, to any great extent.”
Chirgwin reports, “To be blunt, there is a place called Mildura whose location is given as exactly where Apple put it - at least, there is in an authoritative source for such a location... In this case, the Australian Gazetteer - the authoritative list of 300,000-plus placenames, complete with coordinates - includes two Milduras. One is the ‘real’ town, the other is an entry for ‘Mildura Rural City,’ coordinates -34.79724 141.76108. It's this second entry that points to the middle of the Murray-Sunset National Park, just near a spot called Rocket Lake.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The damage is done. Not that Maps needed any additional damage. So, there you have it.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Y" for the heads up.]
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