- Tim Cook said he regretted the rocky launch of Apple Maps in 2012
- Apple CEO said the company learned from its mistakes
- However, it comes as Apple’s Siri revamp appears to be delayed by more than two years.
Tim Cook will step down as CEO of Apple after 15 years at the helm, and after all that time you imagine there may be a moment or two that he looks back on with regret. Turns out yes, as he recently revealed to Apple employees in a leaked public meeting, but I wonder if he could have made a different decision.
Speaking to Apple employees, Cook chose the disastrous launch of Apple Maps in 2012 as his “first big mistake,” according to a Bloomberg report. And not without good reason: In many places around the world, the initial launch of Apple Maps was so bad (with incorrect addresses, mislabeled places, inaccurate satellite images, and much more) that Cook was forced into a contrite and very rare public apology. Scott Forstall, the Apple executive in charge of Maps, was ousted from the company entirely.
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 trying more local-type things.” In other words, it seems as if Apple couldn’t see the forest for the trees: it was so focused on getting the details right in local areas of the company that it forgot to look at the bigger picture and broader issues affecting the service.
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That said, like any good mistake, Cook said the launch of Apple Maps turned out to be a “valuable experience” for the company. “We apologized for it and said, ‘Use these other [mapping] applications. They are better than ours. And that was a humbling thing,” he added, before continuing: “But it was the right thing to do for our users. And so it’s an example of how to keep the user at the center of the decisions we make… Now we have the best map application on the planet. “We learned about perseverance and did exactly the right thing after making the mistake.”
Cook said other mistakes, such as the abandoned AirPower charger and the scrapped self-driving car project, were on his list of regrets. However, he added that Apple had largely avoided the product recalls and cancellations that have plagued other companies in recent history.
Analysis: Has Apple really learned its lesson?
While Cook can cite Maps’ bumpy start when the product “wasn’t ready” as a “valuable experience,” it’s not the case that Apple has managed to avoid a repeat of 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 that 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 with apps, and more. However, we won’t receive any of that for many more months. Even when those features do arrive, they will arrive more than two years later than promised.
If you say that launching a product too early was a serious 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 evidently nothing more than a set of flashy mockups as the real thing, suggests that Apple hasn’t fully taken the Maps fiasco into account.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s a common problem for Apple. The company has been remarkably consistent when it comes to announcing a product or feature and then delivering on it. But it’s frustrating to watch Tim Cook discuss a clear example of a half-baked product that was rushed out the door in the exact same week we got a timely reminder about an overhyped Siri overhaul that wasn’t even close to being ready when it was released 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 demonstrate, if you’re going to talk, you might as well walk the walk.
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