Apple Maps may have been the butt of a lot of jokes back in the day, going so far as to spawn an unusual annual celebration for one of the biggest names in the navigation industry, but it doesn't look like the Cupertino-based tech giant has altogether abandoned its dream of challenging market leader Google... someday.

Instead, the company went back to the basics and decided to rebuild the core app experience from the ground up, gathering data itself by doing "more than 4 million miles of driving" to add detail and improve accuracy. A massive update aiming to completely overhaul ...