- Tim Cook said he regretted the shaky launch of Apple Maps in 2012
- Apple’s CEO said the company learned from its mistakes
- Still, it comes as Apple’s Siri revamp looks set to be delayed by over two years
Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO after 15 years at the helm, and after all that time, you’d imagine there might be a moment or two he looks back on with regret. As it turns out, there is, as he recently revealed to Apple employees in a leaked town hall meeting — but I wonder if he might have made a different choice.
Speaking to Apple employees, Cook singled out the disastrous Apple Maps launch in 2012 as his “first really big mistake,” according to reporting from Bloomberg. And for good reason: in many places around the world, Apple Maps’ first release was so bad—with incorrect directions, mislabeled locations, inaccurate satellite imagery, and more—that Cook was forced into a contrite and very rare public apology. Scott Forstall, the Apple executive in charge of Maps, was pushed out of the company entirely.
According to Bloomberg, Cook summed up Maps’ disastrous opening salvo this way: “The product wasn’t ready, and we thought it was because we were testing more local kinds of things.” In other words, it seems Apple couldn’t see the forest for the trees — it was so focused on getting the details in the local areas for the company that it neglected to see the bigger picture and the broader issues affecting the service.
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That said, like any good mistake, Cook said the Apple Maps rollout turned out to be a “valuable experience” for the company. “We apologized for it and we said, ‘Go and use these others [mapping] apps. They are better than ours.’ And it was humble pie,” he added, before continuing, “But it was the right thing for our users. And then it’s an example of keeping the user at the center of the decisions we’ve made… Now we have the best map app on the planet. We learned about persistence and we did the right thing after making the mistake.”
Cook said other missteps, such as the abandoned AirPower charger and the scrapped self-driving car project, were on his list of regrets. Still, he added, Apple had mostly avoided the product recalls and cancellations that have dogged other companies in recent history.
Analysis: Has Apple actually learned its lesson?
While Cook can cite Maps’ bumpy start when the product was “not ready” as a “valuable experience,” it’s not like Apple has managed to avoid repeating the same mistake. In fact, we got a reminder of that just 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 it a problem? Well, Apple originally unveiled the new version of Siri in June 2024, after which the company promised that Apple Intelligence would enable Siri to understand your personal context, work with apps, and more. Still, we won’t get any of that for many months yet. Even when these features do come, they will be over two years later than promised.
If you say that releasing a product too soon was a serious mistake, but claim that it taught you valuable lessons, you need to actually prove it in practice. The Siri debacle — where Apple was clearly caught flat-footed by the advent of ChatGPT and panicked, passing off what was clearly nothing more than a set of flashy mockups as the real thing — suggests that Apple hasn’t quite taken the Maps fiasco on board.
Of course, that’s not to say that this is a common problem for Apple. The company has been remarkably consistent when it comes to announcing a product or feature and then actually following through on it. But it’s frustrating to see Tim Cook discuss a clear example of a half-baked product being rushed out the door in the exact same week that we get a timely reminder of an overhyped Siri overhaul that was nowhere near ready when it was shunted out into the world.
No tech leader is perfect, and compared to some of his lackluster contemporaries, Tim Cook looks close to angels. But as both Apple Maps and Siri show, you have to go for a walk if you want to talk to you.
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