God, if there was ever a need for use of an appendix on the internet, this article would be it.
Really didn't need to see 90% of the images. The article was so verbose, too, taking ten pages to conclude a simple arithmetic count of cities and road shields.
Didn't help that on my screen the content/white distribution was literally 30/70, like I'm running a mobile phone simulator on my laptop spent a minute in the CSS to change it.
Anyway this was a great first pass, although it feels to me like the least interesting. Why? Because maps start to really make or break as a utility tool, once you introduce some kind of goal, which has some level of interaction, configuration and changes to the map.
For example, search (say by voice) for Starbucks and everything pops up. The notion that Starbucks didn't show on the default map view at the default zoom, is pretty meaningless. Or pick a location and then press 'navigate', and relevant roads and shields pop up. The notion immediately prior to this interaction all roads and shields they weren't sprinkled all across the map in all directions, isn't really important.
But none of that functionality was examined, which is THE driving force between differences in maps for actual human beings with actual human being purposes.
Anyway I'm sure it'll get covered in the future, but I felt it to be a surprisingly weak article. Let's not forget this isn't just some random guy writing an essay, this is one of the leads of the Apple Maps cartography for almost half a decade.
I think one thing went missing too in the focus on two of the biggest anglo-saxan cities in the world and the backyard of Apple/Google, which is that the world's population doesn't live there, and that Apple sucks and Google functions in less Western areas. Just read this thread and you'll find lots of anecdotal evidence.