Could Apple risk iPhone popularity with Bing?

It's one of those catch 22 situations where Apple feels it needs to do something before Google becomes too much of an enemy, but risk making some of their loyal users unhappy. The two companies can definitely be called "frienemies" as they both compete in the mobile space now, but iPhone users generally don't have any problems with Google.

To start moving away from their dependence on default applications like Google Maps and Google Search, Apple is in the process of striking deals that will replace these popular Google-branded applications. The most interesting is still in the works -- but it sounds as though Apple wants to partner with Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine for the phone.

Let's analyze that for a minute. First, close to 70% of iPhone users like Google enough to have it as their search engine default in their web browser on their computer. In addition, there is a decent number of "mac users" that own iPhone -- I don't think they will be impressed if apple makes a decision like this either.

Changing to Bing, and providing a replacement for Google Maps may be a bad decision by Apple -- what do you think?