- Tim Cook said he regrets Apple Maps’ hesitant launch in 2012
- Apple CEO says the company has learned from its mistakes
- Yet this comes as Apple’s Siri redesign appears to be delayed by more than two years.
Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO after 15 years at the helm of the company, and after all that time, one would imagine that there might be a moment or two that he looks back on with regret. Turns out that’s the case, as he recently revealed to Apple employees in a leaked town hall meeting – but I wonder if he could have made a different choice.
Speaking to Apple employees, Cook singled out the disastrous launch of Apple Maps in 2012 as his “first really big mistake,” according to a Bloomberg report. And it’s not without reason: In many places around the world, the initial version of Apple Maps was so bad — with incorrect directions, mislabeled locations, inaccurate satellite imagery, and more — that Cook was forced to issue a contrite and very rare public apology. Scott Forstall, Apple’s head of Maps, has been completely removed from the company.
According to Bloomberg, Cook summed up Maps’ calamitous opening salvo this way: “The product wasn’t ready, and we thought it was because we were testing more local products.” In other words, it seems Apple can’t see the forest behind the trees: it was so focused on getting specific details right in local areas of the company that it neglected to look at the bigger picture and the broader issues affecting the service.
Article continues below
That said, like any good mistake, Cook said deploying Apple Maps proved to be a “valuable experience” for the company. “We apologized for it and said, ‘Go use these other [mapping] applications. They are better than ours. And it was a modest pie,” he added, before continuing: “But it was the right thing for our users. It is therefore an example of keeping the user at the center of the decisions we have made… We now have the best cartographic application on the planet. We learned perseverance and did exactly the right thing after we made the mistake.
Cook said other missteps, like the scrapped AirPower charger and abandoned self-driving car project, were on his list of regrets. He added, however, that Apple has mostly avoided the product recalls and cancellations that have plagued other companies in recent history.
Analysis: Has Apple really learned its lesson?
Although Cook can cite Maps’ bumpy start when the product “wasn’t ready” as a “valuable experience,” Apple has failed to avoid repeating the same mistake. In fact, we got a reminder of that this week when Google revealed that the revamped version of Siri – powered at least in part by Google Gemini – would arrive later in 2026.
Why is this a problem? Well, Apple initially revealed the new version of Siri in June 2024, after which the company promised that Apple Intelligence would allow Siri to understand your personal context, work in apps, and much more. Yet we won’t get any of this for several more months. Even when these features arrive, they will be more than two years later than expected.
If you say that releasing a product too early was a big mistake, but claim that it taught you valuable lessons, you need to prove it in practice. The Siri debacle – where Apple was clearly blindsided by the emergence of ChatGPT and panicked, passing off something that was obviously nothing more than a set of flashy mockups as the real deal – suggests that Apple hasn’t fully addressed the Maps fiasco.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that this is a common problem at Apple. The company has shown remarkable consistency when it comes to announcing a product or feature and then implementing it. But it’s frustrating to see Tim Cook discussing a clear example of a half-baked product that was rushed out the door in exactly the same week that we get a timely reminder of an over-hyped Siri redesign that was far from ready when it was introduced to the world.
No tech leader is perfect, and compared to some of his ghoulish contemporaries, Tim Cook seems almost angelic. But as Apple Maps and Siri show, if you want to talk, you also have to walk.
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp Also.
The best laptops for every budget
