In 2012, Apple Maps was so broken that Tim Cook published a public apology telling iPhone users to download competitors' apps instead. The executive who ran Maps refused to sign that apology. Within a month, he was gone. What Apple did next explains why its map now looks like a Pixar movie. The company stopped licensing data from TomTom and started collecting its own. It outfitted hundreds of cars and planes with LiDAR arrays and eight-camera rigs, each van running a Mac Pro bolted to the…