During the years before Apple’s old map was replaced with its new one, Apple Maps users sometimes noticed that Apple Maps’s navigation mode seemed to display a much higher level of detail than Apple’s main map—with features like tennis courts, baseball diamonds, and parking lot shapes shown in very specific areas.

Early versions of Apple Maps’s iOS app also shipped with a bug, whereby sometimes after ending a navigation session, the navigation-style map would “stick” and remain visible. Thanks to this bug, we have a couple of screenshots of the differences between Apple’s old “Standard” and “Navigation” maps at the time of Apple Maps’s 2012 launch.

Here, for instance, is the area near Google’s campus in Mountain View, California. Notice that back in 2012, Apple’s “Navigation” map showed details like golf course sand traps, even though its “Standard” map did not:

And here’s the eastern end of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Notice the shapes for tennis courts as well as the real-world path widths on Apple’s “Navigation” map:

This enhanced level of detail was only available in a handful of areas, almost always the inner cores of major U.S. metropolitan areas. For instance, the screenshot below shows that San Francisco’s enhanced level of detail ended right near the San Francisco / Daly City line:

The source of this detail was Apple’s Japanese data provider, Increment P Corp (“City Maps, 1:2,500 scale”). And given what we’ve seen over the past few years, it now appears as if this unique dataset served as the inspiration behind the enhanced map data that Apple has been shipping in parts of North America and Western Europe (a.k.a. “Apple’s New Map”).

In essence, Apple is taking the detail that was only available in a handful of city cores and expanding it across whole countries.

Not only that, but it also appears as if Apple’s “Navigation” map itself is now serving as part of the inspiration behind Maps’s 2021 redesign:

In other words, one way to think about Apple Maps’s redesign is as a unification of Apple’s, up until now, separate and very different-looking “Standard” and “Navigation” maps: