Maps App New Features In macOS Monterey

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at what's new in the Maps App in macOS Monterey.

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So among the many new things in macOS Monterey are a whole ton of new features in the Maps App. Now most, perhaps all of these, are also in iOS 15. Let's start off by looking at the detail in city maps. So when you go to a major city, and more cities will be rolled out in the future I'm sure, you can see a lot of detail now especially in 3D view. So right here over the Coit Tower in San Francisco let's go to 3D and you could see now how the elevations are shown. Let's zoom in even further here and if we adjust the elevation we could see here how you can see the hill. I'm going to spin it around and you could see even more how it shows that this is on a hill and there are streets there below it. Plus notice the detail in the trees and in the Tower itself. You can see this in a lot of major cities at major points like this. Watch as I spin around and I could really tell what's going on here in terms of the elevation. Now you can also see here you have a lot more information in the lanes and things like crosswalks here on the roads. 

Here's top down view of Times Square and you could see the different lanes here and watch as I zoom in I get even more detail like which are the turning lanes and bus only and things like that. You can see these also when you go into 3D view. Look how detailed these are. I have already experienced on the iPhone how driving directions actually use these and it will tell you how to get into the right lane. So it's basically showing you all the information it has for giving you directions. 

Now speaking of directions you also now can set departure or arrival times. So this is very useful because as you can see here getting from Brooklyn to Times Square by car right now supposedly takes 36 minutes. But that's not always what you want. You want to be able to plan. So if I were to do this instead of at 1 p.m., 

1 a.m. it's 21 minutes. Usually you want to do the opposite. Sometime at night you're trying to plan the trip for the morning and then you wakeup and find that it's actually going to take much longer to get somewhere because you were looking at traffic from night versus day. Now when you switch to transit view here, like before, you're going to see subway and rail lines. But now also some key bus routes in areas will be shown. I don't see bus routes shown here in my hometown and I don't know enough about bus routes to show them in other towns. But supposedly key bus routes will now be included in addition to rail lines. Also with transit directions you can now plan and have a future leave or arrival time. So you can more accurately figure out what bus, subway, rail line, light rail, whatever you should be looking for when you actually leave. You don't have to wait until the last minute to figure that out.

There's also an interesting feature where you can find the nearest station to you from a line. So, for instance, here's the RTD A-Line in Denver. If I click on it here it's going to bring up the A-Line but it's going to show me here my nearest A-Line Station using my location. It's not here on the map. It's somewhere else. It figures out that that's the closest station to me and I can click it to go to that station. There you could see the departures that are coming up next. So then if I click here and Add To Favorites I'll have that station here. Then I could click the station any time I want and see the next departure for that station. 

Place Cards have also been updated. This is the information that you see when you click on a address or landmark or something. There's a lot of information that you can then scroll through about that location. The Guides too have been updated a little bit. There's a kind of a Home Page for all the guides now. It's not easy to get to. You're not going to find a guide home page listed here unfortunately. But if you click on Search and you look here you're going to see Guides under Editor's Picks right here. Also browse by publisher. So if you go into any of those, let's go into Editor's Picks here, you're going to see this list of Guides and you can change what guides you're looking at. So you can go to Editor's Picks, you can scroll all the way down and go to All Guides if you want, and see a complete list of all of the different guides. You can see here at the top 1544 different guides. So it's probably best to actually pick the area that you want and look at those guides. Or if you look here you can see that you can browse by a publisher. So you can go to a specific publisher and grab those guides. 

When you're searching for restaurants you could see you could search nearby. One of the things it does better than before is if you move the map the actual search results will repopulate on the map, or at least they should. I find that it works better than before but it still doesn't work all the time. You're also supposed to be able to look by cuisine. So I find it works if you actually type the name of the cuisine in Search like that.

Settings has been updated. If you go into Preferences, under General, you're going to find all the Settings basically listed right here. But there is a second page of Settings for route planning. It's also supposed to be easier than before to report problems. So if you click on a card like this and you scroll to the bottom, there's Report an Issue. You can then go in and report the type of issue. So there's more here you can do if you notice something is wrong and you want to correct it. 

Finally, there's the great Globe View. So let's zoom out and just keep going and you'll eventually end up with Glove View like this. You can spin the earth around. Let's get rid of the sidebar there and you can see it's actually centered in the window. We can then go to change the type of map. So let's go to Explore. We can see here all the terrain. You can zoom in a certain amount. You can see a lot of detail. You could also go to Satellite View and it will show you satellite view. One of the great things here is that you actually get to see day and night. So you can tell if you want to call somebody on the other side of the world kind of what time of day it is. This is also just great for learning about geography. You could go in and you could see the political lines drawn here. Country names, capitols, zoom in to see more cities. Easily switch between Satellite View and Exploration View. Click on things to bring up cards and learn more. Of course you've got old features as well like Flyover to be able to go into a specific area and ask if there's a Flyover tour for it. Take a virtual tour of the area. 

So Apple continues to improve Maps with every update of its Operating System. At this point the long held belief that Goggle Maps is better than Apple Maps, I think is just plain wrong. They are pretty much on par with each other although they do have different features. Goggle is still probably has better search results for small and little known places. Of course Goggle has its own review system where Apple is relying on Yelp. But I think Apple Maps is just as good for directions, finding things, dealing with transit, and actually looks a lot better and works faster and more efficiently on Apple devices. So if early on you decided you were just going to stick with Goggle Maps for things and ignore Apple Maps, I encourage you now, with macOS Monterey and iOS 15, to give Apple Maps another look.