A couple of days after the iPhone 5 was announced in 2012, I met with Apple Inc. for one of the off-the-record briefings the company likes to give tech journalists after a new device launch. We were in London, sitting upstairs in the company’s gleaming Covent Garden store.

Apple had just decided to remove Google Maps from its iOS operating system and replace it with a maps app it had built in-house. It was a fine strategy, were it not for the fact that Apple’s app didn’t know much about where anything was. Towns, suburbs, roads — all missing. And from our vantage point, I was able to point out that the famous pub that could been seen out the window didn’t exist in Apple Maps.

© Bloomberg