Apple updates everything

Lunch comic by Børge Lund, translated from Norwegian to English by me, no permissions whatsoever, as usual

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last week or so, Apple has released their new iPhone 5, alongside the big update iOS 6 for older iPhones and iPads. And from what I hear, although the new iPhone is quite a bit better hardware-wise compared to the older iPhones, the software has quite a few disappointments. The dedicated YouTube app is gone, and the builtin map app no longer uses Google Maps, but rather their own Apple Maps solution.

And boy, what a disappointment new the Apple Maps is. I haven’t tried it first hand myself, but given all the problems I’ve heard in the tech news lately, Apple has made one of their biggest mis-steps of recent times (not counting the lawsuits, that is). Even if only less than half of the problems reported in the news are true, it’s a huge mistake, brinking on a scandal (if it isn’t already). Google Maps has taken Google years to perfect, and Apple Maps seems more like something that was slapped together last minute, which is very unlike Apple to do. Also, this big change in the maps app was as surprising to Google as it was for the rest of us, considering the news has reported that Apple had over a year left on their license agreement for Google Maps.

These particular changes are the two main reasons I’ve postponed upgrading my iPad to iOS 6, and I won’t be doing that until Google has officially finished up and released native iPad apps for both YouTube and Google Maps. I’ll just have to deal without the other improvements until such a time comes.

I still won’t consider buying an iPhone 5, though. As I mentioned before, I recently got the Samsung Galaxy S3, and after living with it for a few months, I’m still happy about the upgrade. I’m not too thrilled with the attack ads I’ve seen from Samsung and Nokia related to the iPhone 5 release, though, but that’s more related to how they attack Apple and their customers.

If you managed to get ahold of the iPhone 5, or you’ve downloaded iOS 6 to your existing iDevice, what do you think of it?