Tim Cook ought to call Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and offer him $30 billion for his AI search engine. And he should do it right away.
[…]
“Not likely!” Perplexity chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko told me of a potential tie-up with Apple. “But Meta-Scale is so unlikely that I feel we aren’t living in a world of likelies.”
Apple and Perplexity have had no M&A discussions to date, Shevelenko added, not even a wink.
Meta Platforms Inc. held discussions with artificial intelligence search startup Perplexity AI Inc. about a possible takeover before moving ahead with a multibillion-dollar investment in Scale AI, according to people familiar with the matter.
Deirdre Bosa and Ashley Capoot, of CNBC, confirmed Bloomberg’s reporting, adding that one source “said Perplexity walked away from a potential deal”.
Apple Inc. executives have held internal discussions about potentially bidding for artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI, seeking to address the need for more AI talent and technology.
You will note the day began with Kantrowitz’s article calling for Apple to buy Perplexity. It was not a reaction to Gurman’s report, which was published late in the afternoon and came after a different story about another possible Perplexity acquisition, to which Gurman also contributed. Heck of a coincidence all of these dropped on the same day.
Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent a publisher, per [Cloudflare CEO Matthew] Prince.
[…]
Now:
For Google, it’s 18:1
For OpenAI, it’s 1,500:1
For Anthropic, it’s 60,000:1
It is a curious side effect of Cloudflare’s size and position that it is among a true handful of companies with this kind of visibility into a meaningful slice of global web traffic.
In an alternate world, these artificial intelligence businesses may have tried to work with publishers. Perhaps they would have given greater prominence to references, self-policed the amount of summarization they would offer, and provide some kind of financial kickback. Instead, they have trained their systems on publishers’ vast libraries without telling them until it is far too late for it to matter. They take so much while providing so little in return. This will surely accelerate the walling-off of the necessarily paid web, further affirming what I have taken to calling “Robinson’s Law”. This helps explain the increasinglyunethical means of acquiring this training data.
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I have many thoughts about the redesigned elements common across most of Apple’s platforms but they are still brewing, much as I hope the same is true for the visual interface itself. There is one thing, though, which is a downright shame: Apple’s guidance for the shape of Mac app icons:
An app icon’s shape varies based on a platform’s visual language. In iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, icons are square, and the system applies masking to produce rounded corners that precisely match the curvature of other rounded interface elements throughout the system and the bezel of the physical device itself. In tvOS, icons are rectangular, also with concentric edges. In visionOS and watchOS, icons are square and the system applies circular masking.
This is no longer optional, but mandated by the system. App icons across Apple’s three most popular operating systems share a similar rounded square mask, and it is a downgrade. Simon B. Støvring correctly calls out the “expressive, varied app icons, a case of character over conformity” as a highlight of past versions of MacOS. I miss detailed and artistic app icons plenty. Indulging in realistic textures and thoughtful rendering was not only a differentiator for the Mac; it also conveyed the sense an app was built with a high degree of care.
Perhaps that is largely a product of nostalgia. Change can be uncomfortable, but it could be for good reasons. Stripping icons of their detail might not be bad, just different. But wrapping everything in a uniform shape? That is, dare I say, an objective degradation.
Since MacOS Big Sur debuted the precursor to this format, I have found it harder to differentiate between applications which, as I understand it, is the very function and purpose of an icon. I know this has been a long-running gripe for those of us of a certain age, but it remains true, and a walk through the history of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines indicates the company also understands it to be true.
The uniform rounded rectangular icons in MacOS Tahoe are the product of a slow but steady series of changes Apple has made to its guidance beginning with OS X Yosemite. At its introduction at WWDC 2014, Craig Federighi said those icons were “beautifully crafted”, “so clean and yet so fundamentally still Mac”. While Apple has long provided recommendations for icon shapes and the angle at which objects should sit, its Yosemite guidelines tended to converge around specific shapes. However, Apple still advised “giving your app icon a realistic, unique shape”, since a “unique outline focuses attention on the depicted object and makes it easier for users to recognize the icon at a glance”. It also said developers should not use the same icon as a companion iOS app, since “you don’t want to imply that your app isn’t tailored for the OS X environment”.
By the next major redesign in MacOS Big Sur, Apple was extolling the “harmonious user experience” of “a common set of visual attributes, including the rounded-rectangle shape, front-facing perspective, level position, and uniform drop shadow”. Still, it emphasized the delight of including a “familiar tool” and “realistic objects” in an icon, in a manner that “float[s] just above the background and extend[s] slightly past the icon boundaries”. This is one of the reasons the MarsEdit icon remains so distinctive to me — not only does the rocket ship have enough contrast with the background, its silhouette is not the same as the icons for Mimestream above it or Fantastical below it. This is not a knock against either of those two apps; they are understandably following the documentation Apple provides and follows with all the first-party app icons I also keep in my dock.
MacOS Tahoe overrides all this previous guidance in both written policy and technical implementation. Apple, as quoted above, now says icons should be square, and the system will take care of rounding the corners — just like on iOS. Since iOS apps can run on MacOS, a lack of being “tailored for the [MacOS] environment” is no longer seen by Apple as something to caution against. But it goes further. Designers should, in its words, “embrace simplicity”:
An icon with fine visual features might look busy when rendered with system-provided shadows and highlights, and details may be hard to discern at smaller sizes. […]
Designers no longer get to decide highlights and shadows, the system does. It defines the shape, too, and non-updated icons that do not conform are doomed to live out their days in a little grey jail cell.
Apple used to guide designers on how to make smaller icons by removing details and simplifying. Something you will often hear from designers is the fun and challenge of very small icons; how does one convey the same impression of fidelity when you have exactly 256 pixels to use? It is a delicate feat. Now, Apple simply says no icon — no matter how large — is deserving of detail. This, to me, betrays a lack of trust in the third-party designers it apparently celebrates.
Moreover, it fundamentally contradicts longstanding icon design principles. Reducing each application’s visual identity to a simple glyph — albeit with the potential for a few layers — on a coloured background necessarily leads to this perverse revision of Figure 5–15 from the 2004 Human Interface Guidelines:
Though this description and figure is specifically regarding toolbar icons, Apple’s rationale for using different shapes remains clear-eyed and simply expressed:
Each toolbar icon should be easily and quickly distinguishable from the other items in the toolbar. Toolbar icons emphasize their outline form, rather than subtler visual details.
Perhaps this reasoning is incorrect. If so, the current guidelines make no effort to explain how or why users are not guided by outline in addition to colour and enclosed shape. Apple simply says icons should be constructed “in a simple, unique way with a minimal number of shapes” on “a simple background, such as a solid colour or gradient”. Not only are there no longer any “subtler visual details”, there is also no distinct outline for each icon. I believe limitations spur creativity, but imposed uniformity sure makes that difficult. This is, however, apparently required because of new icon formats available to users, including a clear version that makes it look as though the glyph and base are an ice sculpture: cool, but entirely indistinguishable from others surrounding it. Again, this wrests control away from designers to give a little bit to users, but only at the behest of and within the boundaries of Apple’s mandates.
The technical and feature improvements in MacOS Tahoe are intriguing. I sure hope the Spotlight improvements are as excellent as they seem to be since I expect I will be increasingly dependent upon it as an application launcher. I am also excited to try Liquid Glass on a Mac. Though I remain skeptical, it is at least interesting. That is something I find difficult to see in the new direction of MacOS icons.
My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest — what you say, what you do — is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.
This article crystallizes for me the uncomfortable feeling I have about prediction markets, generally, and the specific feeling I got when I read the phrase “[c]ombining Polymarket’s accurate, unbiased, and real-time prediction market probabilities with Grok’s analysis and X’s real time insights”. The whole point is to turn someone’s being correct — not right, in any moral or ethical sense, nor principled, but merely correct — into money, which is the purest expression of the fiction that being financially successful is a product of being smart, and vice versa.
Marie Woolf, of the Globe and Mail, reporting on the extraordinarily broad provisions of Bill C-2:
New powers in the government’s border bill would allow the police and CSIS to request information on whether people have accessed services from abortion clinics, doctors, hotels and other entities without a warrant from a judge, experts warn.
There is no definition or obvious limitation on the services in question or the person who provides them – it could be a telecom provider, physician, hospital, library, educational institution, or financial institution. But why stop there? The provision is so broad that your dry cleaner or barber are captured by it. If served with the appropriate form, anyone who provides services is required to confirm whether they have provided services to any subscriber, client, account, or identifier. They must also disclose whether they have any information about the subscriber, client, account or identifier as well as advise where and when they provided the service. On top of that, they must advise when they started providing the service and list the names of any other person that may have provided other services.
Kate Robertson, of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab:
While Bill C-2 does not explicitly state that it is paving the way for new and expanded data-sharing with the United States or other countries, the legislation contains references to the potential for “agreement[s] or arrangement[s]” with a foreign state, and references elsewhere the potential that persons in Canada may become compelled by the laws of a foreign state to disclose information. Other data and surveillance powers in Bill C-2 read like they could have been drafted by U.S. officials.
Robertson and the Citizen Lab explain how this seems to be driven by compliance with the Second Additional Protocol to the Cybercrime Convention, but it could have far-reaching implications as currently drafted.
Most smart TV operating system (OS) owners are in the ad sales business now. Software providers for budget and premium TVs are honing their ad skills, which requires advancing their ability to collect user data. This is creating an “inherent conflict” within the industry, Takashi Nakano, VP of content and programming at Samsung TV Plus, said at the StreamTV Show in Denver last week.
During a panel at StreamTV Insider’s conference entitled “CTV OS Leader Roundtable: From Drivers to Engagement and Content Strategy,” Nakano acknowledged the opposing needs of advertisers and smart TV users, who are calling for a reasonable amount of data privacy.
Thanks to the failed nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, the country actually has privacy protections specifically related to television and video services. Yet even with all the data advertisers are able to obtain — sometimes illicitly — it is never enough for this greedy, unethical industry.
It’s a cool, sunny morning at Apple Park as I’m walking my way along the iconic glass ring to meet with Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, for a conversation about the iPad.
[…]
I came into this WWDC thinking – or, at the very least, hoping – that Apple would show a newfound commitment to the iPad and iPadOS, addressing the longstanding concerns of those who have been pushing iPadOS to its limits while keeping true to the essence of the device. It’s a careful balancing act, but having tried iPadOS 26 on my 13” iPad Pro for the past week, it seems clear to me that Apple delivered this year.
An on-the-record interview with an Apple executive is always going to be a guarded affair, and this is no different. Federighi is very clearly trying to sell the achievements of iPadOS 26 without veering into substantial self-criticism.
I understand all of that, yet I think Viticci’s interview is worth every word. It is a beautifully written article, and both parties explore depths of the iPad’s existence I had not considered for a long time. Federighi directly addresses critics who thought Apple is perhaps coasting on the iPad — not me directly, of course, but along similar lines to what I wrote last year about the latest iPad Pro models.
To Apple’s credit, here is what I will say: for the first time in many years, I am seriously considering buying a new iPad. But I know this system too well; I recognize it is perhaps best to wait for iPadOS reviews before I commit. I like the iPad a lot conceptually. I have consistently found it frustrating in practice. Perhaps this is the year that breaks the trend.
One of my favorite moments from WWDC 2025 was when Apple designer Billy Sorrentino introduced the changes to visual intelligence. The new screenshot features in iOS 26 are already among my favorites, but what really caught my eye was the surprising amount of screen time given to Tapbots’ Ivory.
Ortolani describes this as an “endorsement”, “snuck” into the presentation. I am not sure it is either. For one thing, these presentations are obviously choreographed with each segment approved by many, many people. Nothing truly sneaks in. For another, I do not know that this is endorsing Mastodon as much as it is evading one, as Eric Schwarz writes:
I also noticed this during the keynote and I think it served a few subtle purposes: highlight an indie developer (Tapbots) that has been developing for Apple’s platforms for years, serve as a way to avoid endorsing a specific commercial social network, and potentially throw some support (indirectly) behind Mastodon. It doesn’t appear that Sorrentino has an account, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on the team that worked on his portion of the presentation does.
Apple probably does not want to associate with Meta’s family of social apps. TikTok is problematic for some number of people and probably not a good illustration of this feature. X is, well, you know. What typical social platforms are left — LinkedIn?
I obviously checked if these were real accounts — Apple used to have a set of fakey Twitter accounts it used in demos like these. But I could not find any public record of them. That is another advantage of Mastodon: Apple could be running a private instance internally just for demos like these. Or, of course, the whole thing could just be a mockup of sorts.
By now you’ll have guessed I’m no fan of Apple’s new-found obsession with rounding every right angle in sight. I have yet to see any objective evidence that this has any purpose beyond aesthetics. If you’ve seen screenshots of the first developer beta-release of macOS 26 Tahoe, then you’ll surely have noticed that, rather than restoring fidelity to Quick Look, this fiction has grown and only become more prominent. I demonstrate this in a series of four screenshots showing the same image that have been rescaled to similar display sizes.
Oakley illustrates the presence of rounded corners clipping the edges of an image in Finder, Quick Look, and across the bottom of a Preview window. Perhaps I am missing something, but I do not believe this issue is new to MacOS Tahoe. Preview in MacOS Sequoia also has rounded corners, albeit not to the same extent. If the corners are bothersome, the image can be zoomed out to show it rendered faithfully.
But this is actually a good theoretical design question: are squared-off corners more honest? Is that something which only applies to images? QuickTime has, since 2009, rounded the corners of its video player. What about webpages, seeing as the bottom corners of Safari are also rounded? Are right angles ultimately the only honest corners as we use square pixels on our screens? I am not being entirely facetious. Rounded corners may be a little cheeky, a little less than honest, but they soften the otherwise stark way applications are drawn.
Bill fired up his demo and it quickly filled the Lisa screen with randomly-sized ovals, faster than you thought was possible. But something was bothering Steve Jobs. “Well, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too?”
“No, there’s no way to do that. In fact it would be really hard to do, and I don’t think we really need it”. I think Bill was a little miffed that Steve wasn’t raving over the fast ovals and still wanted more.
Steve suddenly got more intense. “Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!”. And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. “And look outside, there’s even more, practically everywhere you look!”. He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.
The Bill here is, of course, the late Bill Atkinson, who softened the corners of a great deal of Mac apps and system features.
Invoking Atkinson, Jobs, and the history of the Mac is not a valid explanation for the MacOS of today or tomorrow. But I cannot object to rounded rectangles on fidelity grounds alone.
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I have been skimming through many of the WWDC videos from this year, and the one on Writing Tools updates caught my attention. You may remember I was frustrated by the current version’s brittle presentation, and the inability to see what changes had been made by Proofread and Rewrite.
Now, it seems from this video that improvements have been made — see the demos at 8:21, 11:09, and 15:27. It still does not seem to show the difference after using Rewrite as changes are made in-place, but at least it is no longer using a popover. I will likely have more to say after I test this, something which I do not plan on doing until MacOS is closer to a release version.
Apple love to preach “the UI gets out of the way of your content” with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let’s compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I’ve added a red line for emphasis.
It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.
I am still getting my bearings on even a first impression of Liquid Glass — for reasons good and bad — but this design goal continues to irk me.
In part, that is because the word “content” makes a little vomit come up in my mouth. Also, this does not seem like a worthwhile goal for human interface design in most applications. The kinds of devices Apple makes are largely interactive. It makes sense for a television set to get out of the way — what you want to see is a movie or a show, not the bezel, the manufacturer’s logo, or anything else. Regardless of whether you are using your iPhone or your Mac, you are probably doing something with what you are seeing. Even if you are semi-passively scrolling social media, you might tap on a profile or share a post. What you can do with what you are seeing onscreen should be evident; it should not recede to the point where it is unclear what is interactive.
The visual language Apple introduced to the Mac, in particular, with Big Sur was a significant regression in this area. I need to spend more time with Liquid Glass, but at least it is more clear that the monochrome icons in toolbars are actually clickable buttons, so that is a plus.
After the Informationreported last month that a truly all-screen iPhone would be arriving next year, I wondered how Apple would handle Dynamic Island stuff without the excuse of a camera cutout. I, for some reason, assumed this stuff would just go away.
I probably overthought this greatly. Take a look at how background tasks are handled in iPadOS 26. They are Live Activities spawned from the Dynamic Island when available, but not dependent on the Dynamic Island. While that software convention emerged from a hardware compromise, it might continue to exist even if the hardware has been updated.
Admittedly, Apple has only shown this for background tasks; it has not enabled full Dynamic Island-style functionality on iPads. But it seems entirely possible the fruits of the island will live on.
Michael Tsai has a good roundup of commentary about Apple’s post-WWDC media spin, adding:
I’ll just repeat that I have almost no interest in the next-generation Siri features. I just want Apple to make the basic stuff — announced back when Steve Jobs was still alive — fast and reliable. Apple never seems to talk about this, and nobody asks them.
I would also like to know if the revised Siri architecture will be able to handle common basic tasks, or if that will take yet another fifteen years and a couple redesigns. It will be extremely funny if I can soon ask Siri when my mom’s flight arrives and it is able to find the information buried in some email or iMessage, but it still unable to stop the only active timer.
President Trump is planning to give TikTok another lifeline.
With a mid-June deadline approaching and trade talks with China in limbo, Trump is expected to sign an executive order staving off enforcement of a law banning or forcing the sale of the app, according to people familiar with his plan.
It would be the third extension since Trump took office in January. The current one expires June 19.
One way to view this is as an indictment of the supposed urgency of this law. Another is through the lens of this increasingly lawless administration.
But, also, even if the entire law weren’t a moral panic smokescreen, we have a more fundamental problem: in a country where the rule of law is functioning, presidents don’t get to selectively ignore federal laws via executive order. That’s not how the Constitution is supposed to work. But Trump is doing exactly that — and worse, he’s using the threat of future enforcement as leverage to engineer his preferred outcome.
I know most every country has flexible interpretations of law enforcement, and this all occurs on a scale. I know this has been the case for past U.S. presidents; I, too, have read Chomsky. But the actions of this administration are sliding further on that scale toward a corrupt and authoritarian regime. Kicking the can down the road on the divest-or-ban requirements of this law is just as much a part of that story as the rest of the hostile domestic and foreign acts so far undertaken by this president.
“We decided this time: make everything we can make available,” said Federighi, “even if it has some nuances on older hardware, because we saw so much demand [for Stage Manager].”
That slight change in approach, combined with other behind-the-scenes optimizations, makes the new multitasking model more widely compatible than Stage Manager is. There are still limits on those devices—not to the number of windows you can open, but to how many of those windows can be active and up-to-date at once. And true multi-monitor support would remain the purview of the faster, more-expensive models.
“We have discovered many, many optimizations,” Federighi said. “We re-architected our windowing system and we re-architected the way that we manage background tasks, background processing, that enabled us to squeeze more out of other devices than we were able to do at the time we introduced Stage Manager.”
Among my many frustrations with iPadOS is how, since its debut, it has aggressively kicked backgrounded apps out of memory, particularly older Safari tabs. This is because it only barely has virtual memory, and only then for specific tasks on some hardware.
Even if there is no real swapping in iPadOS 26, I hope this indicates tabs can linger for longer in the background. The ability to juggle multiple tasks without requiring reloading information is a bare minimum requirement for “Mac-like multitasking” in my view. I look forward to finding out from reviewers if this has been accomplished.
Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak found time to chat with a few journalists and media personalities this week. Both sat down for video interviews with Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal and Mark Spoonauer and Lance Ulanoff from Future U.S. publications, while Federighi alone spoke with Justine Ezarik.
“We found that when we were developing this feature that we had, really, two phases, two versions of the ultimate architecture that we were going to create,” he explained. “Version one we had working here at the time that we were getting close to the conference, and had, at the time, high confidence that we could deliver it. We thought by December, and if not, we figured by spring, until we announced it as part of WWDC. Because we knew the world wanted a really complete picture of, ‘What’s Apple thinking about the implications of Apple intelligence and where is it going?'”
As Apple was working on a V1 of the Siri architecture, it was also working on what Federighi called V2, “a deeper end-to-end architecture that we knew was ultimately what we wanted to create, to get to a full set of capabilities that we wanted for Siri.”
Federighi insisted Apple had a functioning, working version of the “V1” architecture that really could do the complex things it showed in its feature presentation at WWDC last year, but it apparently did not work well enough. Federighi said they have the “V2” version working today, too — but was not interested in providing a demo of either version, nor commit to a date more specific than “2026”. This is a message it was careful to reinforce in other interviews.
I can understand why Apple would want to dispel the idea that it never had a truly functional version of this software. Joswiak, speaking to Stern, said “there’s this narrative out there that … it was demoware only. No […]”. From a user’s perspective, however, this is a distinction without a difference, relying almost entirely on the fuzzy boundary between software that works only for the purpose of a single filmed demo, and software that works so poorly as to effectively be the same. But putting this on the record will be important as Apple prepares to defend itself over allegations of false advertising. That is, I think, who this statement is for — not for me, you, the public at large — but for itself and, by extension, its shareholders.
The same AI spam farm operation has also targeted the American Council on Education’s site, Stanford, NPR, and a subdomain of vaccines.gov. Each of the sites have slightly different names — on Stanford’s site it’s called “AceNet Hub”; on NPR.org “Form Generation Hub” took over a domain that seems to be abandoned by the station’s “Generation Listen” project from 2014. On the vaccines.gov site it’s “Seymore Insights.” All of these sites are in varying states of useability. They all contain spam articles with the byline “Ashley,” with the same black and white headshot.
Several people have asked how this happened, and I’m not 100% sure! Almost every subdomain points to different EC2 IP addresses in AWS’s us-west-1 and us-west-2 regions, and each one hosts a WordPress installation with different content, but the same author and similar templates. Here’s my list. https://docs.google.com/…
I found a bunch of affected sites not on Baio’s list by searching the web for “term of use” “ashley” “minutes read”. Western Digital got hit hard. On one, I found a link back to a GitHub account by the name of pgpump containing some interesting and relevant repos. The key word “arsae” also turned up a few similar-looking scripts in other users’ repos, and a PHP script by the same name. I am not the right person to try to figure this out, but whoever is behind this appears to be continuing as their most recent commits happened last week.
Update: “Marshall Banana” in the 404 article comments points to a likely reason for the varied and high-profile spam hosting: dangling DNS entries.
Apple has made no announcement that can find about a significant expansion in the availability of cycling directions across Canada, but I thought it was worth noting here because it impacts me personally. I need no other excuse.
As of yesterday, Apple’s iOS feature page indicated Canadian cycling directions were only available in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. The list has grown substantially today, adding:
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Finland
Greece
Ireland
Italy
Monaco, because I guess even tax-dodging billionaires sometimes hop on their bikes, too
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Portugal
San Marino
Singapore
Sweden
Switzerland
Thailand
Vatican City
In addition, three places were upgraded from availability in specific cities to, apparently, whole-country directions:
Canada
Spain
United Kingdom
Some of this expansion may truly be new, but it seems to me this page is merely catching up. For example, it only now includes the Netherlands, where cycling directions have been available for a year. The expansion to Calgary was noticed on 4 April by Reddit user drinkyourwaterbitch. I cannot recall receiving an in-app notification of this change which arrives just in time for cycling season here.
I cannot speak to anywhere else but, in my testing, Canadian availability is broad. Coverage includes not only larger cities like Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Ottawa, Victoria, and Winnipeg, but also smaller towns, and even Northern Canada. It also includes rural routes. I was able to get cycling directions within Iqaluit, and between Inuvik and Squamish. Eight-and-a-half days straight, if you are wondering, with a total climb of 70,200 metres.
More practically, the cycling directions within Calgary seem, overall, pretty good. Without changing any settings, Maps sometimes chooses different routes than I would take. On a ride I am familiar with, Maps auto-selected a 51-minute, 13-kilometre path instead of one it says takes 42 minutes over 11 kilometres, the main difference being a 100 metre climb compared to 150 metres. Yet, with a different destination, Maps selected a ride that takes three minutes longer and requires a greater amount of climbing, but is shorter. Both appear to have a similar mix of roads and bike lanes, so I am not sure what to make of this.
I also tried putting in a route to a pharmacy with a particularly excellent selection of coffee beans and other dry goods. Instead of putting me on the protected bike lane on Edmonton Trail, visible from the Look Around imagery, it suggests a route on Fourth Street — which is a one-way road in the opposite direction. The step-by-step directions suggest there is a cycle lane along Fourth Street but I can assure you there is not — I checked. Google Maps gets it right.
Canadian cyclists like myself can rejoice at having much greater coverage that takes into account our unique needs. At last, we can make an informed decision about how we can get to a store that, upon arrival, we find is closed because the listed hours are wrong. It is still Apple Maps, after all.
