Apple Updates iOS to 6.1 ⇥ apple.com

The release of iOS that seemed perpetually in beta (it was first released to developers in November) has been released to the general public. Apple mentions that 6.1 enables LTE on dozens of new carriers, and that there are some improvements to Siri. But what Apple doesn’t mention — and the reason this is an excellent update — is that 6.1 includes some big improvements to searching in MapKit (and, consequently, in Maps). Searching for “coffee” used to return places with “coffee” in the name; it now shows local coffee shops, regardless of their name. Search was my single biggest complaint with the new Apple-designed Maps, but it looks like it’s largely been fixed (in my area, at least).