Apple has been under a very scrutinizing gaze since the now-infamous debacle pertaining to a location in Australia. For anyone unfamiliar with the issue, reports stated that drivers who were making their way to an Australian city, Mildura, ended up “lost” deep in the backlands of the Australian bush.
Some of these drivers were very dehydrated, and some were without food and water for 24 hours in the searing Australian heat. Upon testing the application themselves, Mildura Police confirmed that Apple Maps listed the city center of Mildura at the center of the National Park, approximately 45 miles away from the actual location of the city.
However, even after the evidence was collected, A new report is defending Apple, and it offers up some interesting information pertaining to Mildura and how it appears on most maps. According to The Australian Gazetteer, which obviously knows more about its own locales than we do, Mildura actually has two locations. The land information tracker shed the light on “Apple’s issue” by proving that Mildura has two listings on every map, one marking the legitimate city center and another marking what is known as Mildura’s Rural Area.
This proves that Apple isn’t entirely at fault for the stranded motorists. It had a correct location for Mildura; it was just the rural National Park and not the city.
Tim Cook has already apologized numerous times for the issues with Apple’s Maps application and is promising to fix all and any issues with it in the future. The company has already seen some major personnel shakeups as a product of the needed corrections. At least we now know that some of the Maps issues, specifically in the case of Mildura, aren’t entirely Apple’s fault.
It leads me to question how many other global locales are marked incorrectly because of a discrepancy between the actual city location and a rural outpost. Hopefully Apple will discover all of these locations soon, and individuals will not end up stranded or hungry because of a miscommunication between the Maps application and the cartographers that built its physical predecessor.
Photo Credit: Apple