On July 27, 2023, Apple released its 3D city experience for the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston areas. In addition, Look Around is now available for the Dallas-Fort Worth area for the first time.

The Dallas area received eight colorful landmark models:

Meanwhile, Houston received seven colorful landmark models:

NOTES

• Forth Worth received no custom building models or icons. (Fort Worth is the U.S.’s 13th most populous city.)

• Surprising omissions in terms of models: no skyscrapers in downtown Dallas (e.g., Fountain Place) or downtown Houston (e.g., JPMorgan Chase Tower, TC Energy Center), San Jacinto Monument, Fort Worth Stockyards, Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. (Compared to other cities, Dallas has a particularly striking nighttime skyline—with many skyscrapers illuminated with colorful lighting. For this reason, it’s slightly surprising that Apple didn’t model any of the office towers similar to how it modeled Miami Tower.)

• TC Energy Center in Houston lost its landmark icon and didn’t receive a new version.

• Even after the release of the Dallas DCE, the 3D building shape for Comerica Bank Tower (Dallas’s 3rd tallest building) is still incorrectly distorted.

• Dallas-Forth Worth is the first metro to receive the DCE without having Look Around coverage ahead of time. Unfortunately, this means we can no longer use some of our earlier methods to forecast future DCE areas.

• With today’s additions, the DCE now covers all twelve of the U.S.’s twelve most important cities.

• Apple appears to be quietly seeding local newspapers and media outlets with screenshots and other details prior to launching new DCE areas. Both the Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News published articles about the new DCEs prior to their releases—and the publications featured screenshots that included profile pictures of the same Apple Maps user. A similar situation happened with the local Boston media earlier this year, prior to the release of the Boston DCE.

• The total combined area of all 24 DCE areas is roughly the size of the U.S. state of Maine or, alternatively, about 20% of the size of California.

• Since the release of the first DCE in early June 2021, Apple has been releasing an average of one DCE per month. This rate has remained consistent over the past 26 months. In other words, it doesn’t seem as if the rate of releases is accelerating in any meaningful way (unlike what we saw with Apple’s map expansions in 2018/2019).

• These cities seem to have the best chances of receiving the DCE over the next year:

  • 🇳🇱 Amsterdam

  • 🇳🇿 Auckland

  • 🇪🇸 Barcelona

  • 🇦🇺 Brisbane

  • 🇧🇪 Brussels

  • 🇺🇸 Denver

  • 🇺🇸 Detroit

  • 🇮🇪 Dublin

  • 🇬🇧 Edinburgh

  • 🇫🇮 Helsinki

  • 🇺🇸 Honolulu

  • 🇵🇹 Lisbon

  • 🇱🇺 Luxembourg City

  • 🇫🇷 Lyon

  • 🇪🇸 Madrid

  • 🇮🇹 Milan

  • 🇳🇴 Oslo

  • 🇦🇺 Perth

  • 🇺🇸 Phoenix

  • 🇺🇸 Portland

  • 🇮🇹 Rome

  • 🇸🇬 Singapore

  • 🇸🇪 Stockholm

  • 🇨🇭 Zürich