>Because the watch performed better on earlier versions of watchOS, and even my iPhone 4S was better at tracking, I think the issue is software.
>The measurement errors are so bad, that they overshadow performance differences between runs, and during runs. At the same time Apple keeps adding more and more incorrect stats and graphs, building on top of a shaky foundation. The kilometer splits measured in seconds imply more accuracy than is delivered.
I've clocked thousands of ~20km runs across all Watch generations and have never seen a significant discrepancy when measured against something like Google Maps. Urban area without skyscrapers or the like.
I’m part of a running group with a mix of Garmin and Apple Watches and the Apple Watches always have pretty different distant readings according to Strava, maybe 2%-5%. The Garmin devices are generally much closer together.
I wonder if the dual-band GPS on the Apple Watch Ultra is an attempt to fix these problems? I would guess that it’s software, with the author, if for no other reason than I’d be surprised if Garmin were all that much better at putting GPS in a tiny housing than Apple.
> I would guess that it’s software, with the author, if for no other reason than I’d be surprised if Garmin were all that much better at putting GPS in a tiny housing than Apple.
After "you're holding it wrong", anything seems possible. But yeah that does seem more likely to be software, it's a surprisingly difficult and fuzzily-defined problem.
My Apple Watch seems to get things wrong differently depending on the shape of my route. I often train on a track that I exactly know the lap distance for, and if I do a 10 mile run the watch will usually tell me that I’ve run about 9.5 miles. Which I kinda presume is due to the location sampling rate cutting distance off the oval shaped track. But every marathon I’ve run with the watch, it puts the full distance about .5 to .25 miles before the finish line.
Weird hill to die on with Apple. That's a 10 year old issue with an iPhone 4, said by a CEO that is long dead.
They gave everyone free bumpers, because sweaty fingers would close the antenna gaps. The statement was true, the gaps were placed where they were expected to least affect the grip.
What exactly would you expect in this case?
The messaging worked. If your iPhone 4 was having signal issue, consider readjusting your hand.
Apple sent out free cases to compensate for the issue.
This is not the nightmare scenario that non-iPhone users made it out to be. Apple haters, like any group of haters are a silly bunch.
It was a bizarre-ass thing to go with from a serious company. They'll be getting shit for that for decades. Sorry, I guess?
> This is not the nightmare scenario that non-iPhone users made it out to be. Apple haters, like any group of haters are a silly bunch.
What nightmare scenario did I imply? I think you're being a little overenthusiastic here. It was just a funny example to show that Apple isn't above screwing up hardware stuff/radios from time to time.
I saw the original video the user that reported it created. That guy was a deceptive idiot. It was obvious that he used trial and error to find a strange, finger-spread death grip that duplicated the issue in the most severe way. What is bazaar is someone that was obsessive enough to develop a grip that produced the issue with the most effect, and used it for personal benefit to gain notoriety.
Not being an antenna engineer, I had also noticed the exact same issue on my Motorola v551 years before, but not that it had anything to do with the grip, merely touching the device anywhere on it caused signal degradation. Apparently, this was a known issue that existed for decades, long before cell phones became ordinary, and the issue can be reproduced on every cell phone from every manufacturer, as well as ordinary radios, and anything that uses an antenna. But I didn't remotely think to try to attack Motorola for personal benefit. I just set the phone down when signal was weak and used bluetooth for data or calls, eliminating the issue, which wasn't Apple's fault and is apparently due to the limitations of antennas.
Singling out Apple was ignorant and deceptive, and fundamentally, Steve Jobs was correct about what that guy was doing, intentionally holding it in an unnatural way in order to produce the effect. That entire affair was nothing but a hatchet job that had nothing to do with user satisfaction and everything to do with negative and toxic personalities that irrationally believe they can gain personal satisfaction by causing misery. The most insidious types of mental illness are those where the mentally ill individual themselves do not suffer, instead they are compelled to make others suffer, which is how narcissism is generationally sustained.
> I saw the original video the user that reported it created. That guy was a deceptive idiot. It was obvious that he used trial and error to find a strange, finger-spread death grip that duplicated the issue in the most severe way. What is bazaar is someone that was obsessive enough to develop a grip that produced the issue with the most effect, and used it for personal benefit to gain notoriety.
That'd be compelling, except it started as wide-spread intemittent reports that the signal strength was just awful, but only for some people. This came up before anyone had any explanation yet, so couldn't possibly have been caused by a youtube video with a particular grip.
Turns out you just have to bridge a gap in the exposed antenna, there's no insane death grip required. It happens way more for left-handed people.
If it happens for every phone and every manufacturer equally, why/how did Apple fix it with a case?
Blocking or bridging the embedded antenna on any cell phone will produce the same results. Apple is high profile, so they got the business, so to speak. Materials that do not conduct electricity like wood, drywall, plastics, and glass will impede a cellular signal, but not block it.
But I really think the problem had to do with bridging that space in the antenna with a conductive material, such as the skin on fingers. The case merely provided a few mm of room for the signal to be able to squeeze through, plus it insulated conductive skin to prevent electrical bridging and deattenuation of the antenna.
Having owned an iPhone 4, I personally never experienced the problem beyond the same exact issue I experienced with a Motorola v551, which is that when placed on a table untouched, the signal strength increased, but then touching or holding it, the signal strength decreased. This can be reliably reproduced over and over again with any cell phone in an area of weak signal. Something about the conductivity of human skin interferes with attenuation of embedded antennas, and this has been true from the first cell phones with embedded antennas and is true of all modern cell phones, that in an area of weak cell signal, any skin contact will reduce signal strength and show one or more fewer bars of signal strength until skin contact is removed.
Apple conceded to a flaw in the design and settled a class action lawsuit, but apparently a few are still needy enough to require Apple be punished forever. The complainers had nothing to compare it to, so they were all, all of them, merely mistaken, the flaw exists in all cell phones with embedded antenna. Instead of proving them all wrong, which would have been academic, Apple laid down. What more would you like them to do?
> Apple conceded to a flaw in the design and settled a class action lawsuit, but apparently a few are still needy enough to require Apple be punished forever.
So, in summary: they fucked up and had a really stupid response, right? I'm failing to see what part of that isn't fair.
> What more would you like them to do?
Nothing. It's just funny. They should probably avoid being ridiculous if they don't want memes about them to exist?
> So, in summary: they fucked up and had a really stupid response, right?
Straw man fallacy. Not everything is so simple. Even though all cell embedded antenna suffer from the same or similar flaw of deattenuating signal when held as opposed to being placed on a grounded surface in conditions of poor cell signal, perhaps the tactic applied was to avoid consumer resentment. Perhaps the legal costs of proving innocence and the common flaw among all similar devices was vastly more than paying the settlement. In fact, I am sure that was the case. Apple took the more equitable high road.
>> What more would you like them to do?
> Nothing. It's just funny. They should probably avoid being ridiculous if they don't want memes about them to exist?
This is merely schadenfreude. Do not believe that it is so that you will find happiness in the misery of others. To do so denies that Karma is never broken, or if you prefer, denies the validity of Newton's 3rd Law of Motion.
Self-esteem has a negative relationship with the frequency and intensity of schadenfreude experienced by an individual; individuals with less self-esteem tend to experience schadenfreude more frequently and intensely.[1]
The problem is that it exposes exactly the rhetoric that people hate from Apple. They're genuinely incapable of admitting when they're wrong, which is unfortunate since they make so many opinionated decisions. It's about as asinine as when Nintendo shipped Mario Party owners a free pair of gloves instead of admitting that their minigames encouraged skin irritation. It's pure posturing, and hardly a solution.
You're welcome to patronize whoever you want as a customer, but from a business perspective this is the sort of behavior that will be heavily scrutinized during antitrust hearings.
> The problem is that it exposes exactly the rhetoric that people hate from Apple. […] It's about as asinine as when Nintendo
So, you admin Apple isn’t the only one. I think you can find examples from any company, especially the publicly traded ones.
Similarly, you’ll never hear a CEO say their new product is decent while the previous one was so-so. The new one always is better, and the old one doesn’t get mentioned, but is implied to be good.
> this is the sort of behavior that will be heavily scrutinized during antitrust hearings.
I doubt it. Even if Apple were exceptional in making this kind of statements, what’s anti-competitive in making them, or in making bad products?
> I’d be surprised if Garmin were all that much better at putting GPS in a tiny housing than Apple.
Given Garmin’s long, long history as a manufacturer of (often very small) GPS devices, I personally wouldn’t be.
(I also know for a fact they do mapping better. This summer I was in the South of Italy and only Garmin accurately distinguished between small public roads and long private driveways while both Google and Apple royally messed this up.)
I used to use a FitBit Ionic (GPS enabled watch) and now use a Garmin watch and fortunately it shows a more accurate and better exercise results. In terms of running I saw a difference of ~10-20% in the distance measured in some terrains. I have not precisely compared everything.
BTW the Fitbit Ionic GPS stopped working and now (if it didn't expire) I will go for the health (battery) recall: https://help.fitbit.com/en_US/ionic.htm and give them to another person. This will be the second replacement since this model stopped working after 1 yr of use and Fitbit sent me a new one.
I wonder if author really got a GPS fix before starting to run. I have clocked 100 runs on watch os 8 exactely along one identical path and usually it is within 3-5 meters where I get the 1km announcement.
> I wonder if the dual-band GPS on the Apple Watch Ultra is an attempt to fix these problems?
The author said their watch worked fine in the past. It also works fine after a warm up period, which suggests it’s not getting a GPS lock at the start of the workout.
It’s a new issue of either a software regression, hardware degradation, or RF interference near their start point.
I thought this was a well known issue with the Apple watches? They only start looking for a GPS fix once you start the workout, which is the worst time since, well, you already started the workout and are running, making getting that fix that much harder.
I think the Ultra watches now have an option to wait for a fix before starting (which is what always happens on the Garmin's).
This is no longer true for Series 8 and Ultra watches. What I’ve not found out is whether this true of any Apple Watch running watchOS 9 or just the latest models.
I have just started using an Apple Watch Ultra for running and it does seem more accurate to me. My old Series 6 would underreport distance, e.g. a 5k park run would be measured as 4.9km. I also noticed with the Series 6 that if I did a u-turn that my pace would drop considerably as the watch was presumably missing some of the distance I had travelled whereas the Ultra seems much better in this regard.
Only way to get accurate real time data when running is to use a good foot pod like Stryd. GPS just isn't as accurate as people think, no matter if you use Apple Watch or Garmin.
That's right, GPS error can be on the order of 10s of meters, worse in urban environments. Google (and presumably Apple) use WPS to enhance location data, meaning a triangulation (simplification here) or location based on known WiFi router and bluetooth beacon positions. They also have a team dedicated to more complex geometric calculations of how the GPS signal may be reflected given the known positions of buildings.
But if you have a clear line of sight that's a different issue. I went cycling on a path next to a river and the GPS trace was buttery smooth.
This used to be true, but in 2000 (!)the US government enabled the full range of GPS features for civilian use, vastly improving the accuracy of GPS receivers.
GPS.gov says single band receivers should be able to get less than 2m accuracy. Dual band units, like the latest Garmin Forerunner watches, can do much, much better.
What you're saying makes sense, of course. I found some hundreds of meters of discrepancies in some rides (Apple Watch 4 vs. Karoo 2). Less than 1% of the total distance, of course.
Cycling computers blend calibrated wheel sensors with GPS data to give the most accurate distance, too. I believe Apple Watch refuses to use bike wheel and crank rotation sensors, but Garmin does use them.
> After about a kilometer I have to cross a busy street, I need to pause there regularly. Pausing always fixes erratic mode.
Given that the “erratic mode” only impacts the beginning of the run and disappears suddenly at known locations, this sounds like an issue of delayed GPS lock.
And given that the problem didn’t exist in the past, it could be a software issue due to upgrades. Or it could be a hardware issue that developed over time, such as something impacting GPS receive sensitivity. Or it could even be a new source of RF interference in the GPS range near the author’s start point, which impacts GPS lock until they get far enough away from it.
Interesting issue, but note that this issue appears to be specific to this one specific person, not a general issue with all Apple Watches as some in this thread are speculating. I certainly have not noticed this behavior on my Watch even with the latest updates.
Sadly, the guy didn't publish the tools they used to produce this. I would have been interested in seeing if I see a similar erratic mode in my own data.
It's a common issue with how the Apple Watch forces you to start the activity before it attempts acquiring gps lock. For many that may work fine, but also for many that gives erratic behavior in the start where they live. All other brands behave the opposite.
> Assuming you’re ready to go, then you’ve got two choices with Apple Watch Ultra. You could go the ‘normal’ route for all Apple Watches up till now, and wait for the 3-second countdown. Once that countdown completes, it’s at that point that the watch goes off and gets GPS signal and HR acquisition – not before. However, the Ultra edition includes a new ‘Precision Start’ feature, that lets you first open the workout up, then see the signal status before you begin
Couldn't the watch request the list of satellites locked to the phone and pretend to be locked to them as well, instead of building the list by itself?
Plenty of people, including the author and me, don't carry a phone any more, just a watch. Anyway the watch really needs its own fix as the phone will be displaced from the watch and have a different orientation even if you have it close by.
That’s possible and I k ow the watch will do this. I run with both my phone and Apple Watch. For long runs 20-26 miles, I use the phone for music to my AirPods. I run slow enough for the watch battery to be drained after a marathon of I try to have my watch do it all.
I’ve had a few instances where the running track gets all wonky when I go through something like a long underpass tunnel. It’s long enough to miss a GPS signal for many minutes. Instead, it guesses where I am based on distance to cell towers (I think). Or at least, that’s what the running trace seemed like to me. Everytime I went under a tunnel, I found out later that I ran a 3 minute mile — on miles 16, 20, and 22 (that’s not possible).
Now I just disable Bluetooth on my watch entirely while doing long runs. I’ve found the watch by itself to be more accurate, in general.
That was my theory too, so I started opening Apple Maps and viewing my location on my watch before starting my run, and anecdotally it increased the initial accuracy by a great amount
aside: My girlfriend tracks her runs with Strava through her Iphone 12 mini. Upon zooming in, the "straight" parts never look straight and look a lot more like a triangle wave. She consistently tracks around 10% larger distance than my Garmin watch. I've checked on the map, and the Garmin distance is the accurate one of the 2.
This would also depend on how she's carrying the iPhone. While putting the GPS receiver on your wrist isn't optimal, putting the iPhone in a pocket or somewhere closer and lower on the body where it sees even less of the sky is worse.
My experience of using Strava on a mid-range Android phone several years ago was that readings were splayed horizontally across (road-side) paths by five or ten meters in many cases. Now that I have a Garmin watch, I am gradually closing in on my former Estimated Best Efforts with readings that appear to be much more accurate in terms of how they correspond to the paths that I've been running on.
Accurate real time pacing information can be useful during races, when it’s easy to get caught up in the pace of the crowd and lose track of the muscle memory for your race pace.
It’s also nice when you want to do any sort of interval training without actually going to a track.
Having accurate overall distances is less important, but is useful if you’re training for a specific distance and want to run some time trials without using a track or measured course.
I pace many half marathon and marathon races. Usually what I need for that is: instantaneous pace, average pace, and lap distance.
I tend to plan my pacing for equal effort, so each lap pace is adjusted for elevation such that in the end the overall pace is just slightly faster than what is needed for goal pace.
Needless to say, I use my Garmin Forerunner 945 for this.
If anyone is running the Seattle Marathon, I'll be there pacing :)
>Assuming it is an aerboic work out, what's the difference if the watch tells you that it's 9.6k, 9.7k, or 9.8k?
If you're tracking incremental progress than such variability makes the data less useful. But that's why I prefer to use natural landmarks and a stopwatch - the smart watches I've used so far are off to the point where I don't trust them.
A friend has both a whoop and an Apple Watch. One or both of them are wrong. He almost never get consistent results between the two, Apple is almost always higher than whoop (avg. heart rate for a given period) it’s a bit depressing.
On the flip side, Apple has FDA clearance to use their device for single-lead ECGs, so I would trust their heart rate reading over a hacky tech startup's.
I’ve just completed a 6 month self comparison of the Whoop v4 and Watch S6 for cycling. I found for long endurance efforts they were surprisingly accurate to each other - but during intervals of intense exertion (eg a KOM/hill climb) often the Whoop would read my HR as ~40-60BPM lower while the watch would reflect an expected reading (160-180bpm). Sometimes after 1-2 mins the whoop would “catch up” but it would leave a giant drop in HR graphing for that interval.
This also lowered the avg HR for the workout on the whoop, as you noted. Happy to share an example comparison graph if you’re interested, just reach out.
For what it’s worth, I ended up cancelling the Whoop this month after trying twice to engage with their data team.
The trouble acquiring a gps lock could be due to 5G towers (remembering all the controversy with the FAA), or a new building, or something else that changed in the built environment.
I have never seen and cannot find the pace graph the author shows as a screenshot from the fitness app. Would love that data. Just spent 10 min googling and gave up. Reminds me of this thread from yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32965288
In iOS 16 it’s tap on the workout, then anywhere under Workout details and scroll a bit. That is really no discoverability issue, because there is even a show more button next to it, that has the same function.
Really weird. The only things I can tap into are the splits and the route map. I can scroll the heart rate over to recovery as well. I’m on ios 15. I wonder if it’s the workout type? Outdoor Run, Open Goal is what I’ve used for years now.
I also don’t include current pace on the watch face but I always assumed it collects that data regardless. I’ll start experimenting because i had no idea this feature existed.
I wonder if at some point Apple reduced the sampling frequency of the gps position to save power? Since this sounds pretty important to the guy, I would buy a Garmin watch or similar to compare to and run with both. I also suspect one of the challenges here is that taking a lot of corners like in an urban environment might result in rounded paths — like if you ran around a rectangular city block it ends up being logged as a square with rounded corners. Whereas if the sampling frequency was higher it would capture those corners much better, or if the authors runs were more of a straight line.
Open health app and press on your profile picture in the upper right corner (scroll to the top). Then scroll down and press export all health data. Also OP mentioned the exported XML has some errors in iOS 16, so beware of that.
Honestly, it doesn't matter for the vast population using these devices. I understand the issue, but for a normal runner, most they care about is how did their pace / heart rate compare to their past runs.
The watch needs updated GPS ephemeris data to accurately calculate the position, received by an aGPS (Assisted GPS) server (over IP) or by satellite.
This takes at least 30 seconds by satellite.
Solution: Tether with IPhone before leaving until fix is achieved, otherwise keep watch outside or near a window for 10-15 minutes before running so that it can update its almanac from overhead satellites and get a fix.
There is no software solution. Buy a newer watch with cellular connectivity and aGPS-support.
OP could have changed exercise habits, leading to more frequently outdated GPS almanac data.
Otherwise, newer OS versions could have degraded the fix algorithm for older Watch-models.
If newer hardware comes with cellular connectivity, newer OS version could assume that by default and not prioritise (or test) backward compatibility with older Watch-models.
The author still seems to be on an Apple Watch 4, if I read correctly. So this seems like a case of Apple shipping a bad update to an older device and not caring. Or OP has a bad device.
Semi related iWatch Rant - if you think running data is bad, try tracking your sleep.
It just doesn't work.
- Sleep for 3h - wake up for 1, sleep for 5 more: records 3h only.
- (being a parent of a small baby) do not sleep at all during the night, sleep 4+3 hours during the day: 0 hours recorded
- sleep trough the night but wake up every 90-100 minutes (baby again): 0 hours recorded
Damn, this is a $500+ device, and it cant even get basic sleep data correctly.
Also, it takes anywhere from 1min to couple of hours for data to appear in the Health app.
OTOH my wife has ~3 year old Huawei Fit watch, which was about $120, and that thing records every 10-15min or longer nap. Without a mistake.
As someone who went through the same process, including using a Huawei watch previously, I encourage you to try Autosleep. It has much better sleep detection magic and exposes a few knobs that enable you to fine-tune the autodetection and also manually correct the sleep records in sensible ways.
It integrates with Health, so it has the bonus of tidying up the sleep data all across the board.
Not related to the developer in any way, just a very happy user.
I've been using it since before WatchOS 7 introduced sleep tracking, and it's scarily accurate even at tracking when I doze off for a short while in bed.
Doesn't seem to be needed since the OP already got the message, but just in case...yet another +1 for AutoSleep, which I use religiously. Great design, just complex enough to give you lots of detailed info, but still simple enough to be easy to parse and use the data. And although I'm asleep when it's in use, near as I can tell, it does a great job of tracking my sleep, including fitful periods and naps. And its percentage "sleep quality" rating seems to correlate very well with my own impression of how good my sleep was and how refreshed I am.
One really valuable thing it has highlighted for me is how much of a negative impact alcohol has on my sleep quality. Very eye-opening. And I would have never known this without AutoSleep.
Sleep tracking always seemed like nonsense to me. You either know you are getting restful sleep or know you are not, and if you are not time is probably better spent taking a proactive approach to establishing healthier lifestyle habits that will lead to more restful sleep. How much is it worth really, to wake up and know exactly how much time you were tossing around not getting rest? I’d imagine you would feel it, statistics or not.
It's very useful information when you are never rested and constantly are trying to tweak variables to observe the impacts to your sleep. I've long since stopped relying on trackers, however, as nothing seemed to display any accuracy whatsoever. I manually record my perception of sleep every night.
I had an Oura ring for a while and found it to be quite accurate. Using it, I found myself adjusting my routine to prioritize sleep.
> You either know you are getting restful sleep or know you are not...I’d imagine you would feel it, statistics or not.
How I feel doesn't always correlate with good sleep. It's just one variable. Knowing whether my sleep is good lets me know that I should be looking at other problems.
Or, in some cases, I am in bed for eight hours, but the quality of my sleep by the numbers is bad. It's not that I'm not getting enough sleep, it's that something is affecting my sleep. Spicy food too late in the evening? Too much caffeine? Not enough hydration throughout the day? It's hard to be mindful of the things that make my sleep worse unless I actually know when my sleep wasn't great.
> You either know you are getting restful sleep or know you are not
Not true. A lot of people with chronic sleep problems (e.g. sleep apnea) feel tired during the day but have no idea why, and don't wake up during the night or have any other direct symptoms that would lead them to have a strong hypothesis for "bad sleep" being the root cause.
Datapoints for each night can help you isolate the causes of poor sleep in your life. An objective measure, even a flawed one, can help a lot in that process.
I used Garmin Fenix 5 for sleep tracking and it has similar issues. In fact, if I sleep during the day, it doesn’t recognise it as a sleep! I checked the garmin support forums and some other users reported the same thing but garmin didn’t care to fix.
Most sleep trackers have similar issues. For example, most won't detect biphasic or polyphasic sleep correctly - it's assumed that sleep happens in one unbroken period once per day. If you get up in the middle of the night for a snack and then go back to sleep, it's a coin flip whether it will be detected as the "end" of sleep, or as a long "awake" period in the middle.
When I hit the snooze button on my phone and go back to sleep for another hour, both my Garmin and Oura are inconsistent whether that extra hour counts as sleep or not.
Garmin's even weirder than most as it asks you for your normal sleep hours when setting up the watch, which suggests that it's not as smart as it should be.
Garmin, to its credit, is slowly moving away from pure sleep tracking and using other metrics like HRV, stress, and yesterday's activity levels to calculate readiness for today's workout.
Regarding sleep: the most important reason why these devices suck for tracking sleep is that you have to recharge them every 24h. That's either not being able to use them during the day for some period or do overnight charging.
I recharged my Pebbles while I was in the shower, since they usually took less than 15 minutes to top up after ~24 hours of usage. I've found my Apple Watch (it is an older model, though) to need too much time to recharge, however, so rather than building a different habit around it I recharge it overnight.
I tried for years, didn't work for me (Apple Watch 2). I mow have a Garmin Fenix 7 which lasts 18 days without recharge, buy has much more limited features (which is fine for me).
As the other poster suggested, AutoSleep is amazing.
I've found if my watch is too loose it won't record sleep well.
It's also a known problem that Apple watches "backup" bugs (which I've experienced twice now). If the problem still continues, I'd recommend you fully unpair/reset your watch and setup it up as a new watch (do not restore from backup).
For anyone interested in heart rate accuracy and sleep tracking accuracy I will recommend to check The Quantified Scientist reviews.
From his latest reviews of the new apple watches, heart rate is pretty much on par with chest strap and sleep tracking is also far better than anything he tested.
Second this; I found it particularly interesting that even the best device (AW) was a bit worse than I would have expected, which means my issues with my own device (Garmin) make a lot more sense.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] thread>The measurement errors are so bad, that they overshadow performance differences between runs, and during runs. At the same time Apple keeps adding more and more incorrect stats and graphs, building on top of a shaky foundation. The kilometer splits measured in seconds imply more accuracy than is delivered.
This.
I wonder if the dual-band GPS on the Apple Watch Ultra is an attempt to fix these problems? I would guess that it’s software, with the author, if for no other reason than I’d be surprised if Garmin were all that much better at putting GPS in a tiny housing than Apple.
After "you're holding it wrong", anything seems possible. But yeah that does seem more likely to be software, it's a surprisingly difficult and fuzzily-defined problem.
They gave everyone free bumpers, because sweaty fingers would close the antenna gaps. The statement was true, the gaps were placed where they were expected to least affect the grip.
What exactly would you expect in this case?
The messaging worked. If your iPhone 4 was having signal issue, consider readjusting your hand.
Apple sent out free cases to compensate for the issue.
This is not the nightmare scenario that non-iPhone users made it out to be. Apple haters, like any group of haters are a silly bunch.
> This is not the nightmare scenario that non-iPhone users made it out to be. Apple haters, like any group of haters are a silly bunch.
What nightmare scenario did I imply? I think you're being a little overenthusiastic here. It was just a funny example to show that Apple isn't above screwing up hardware stuff/radios from time to time.
I saw the original video the user that reported it created. That guy was a deceptive idiot. It was obvious that he used trial and error to find a strange, finger-spread death grip that duplicated the issue in the most severe way. What is bazaar is someone that was obsessive enough to develop a grip that produced the issue with the most effect, and used it for personal benefit to gain notoriety.
Not being an antenna engineer, I had also noticed the exact same issue on my Motorola v551 years before, but not that it had anything to do with the grip, merely touching the device anywhere on it caused signal degradation. Apparently, this was a known issue that existed for decades, long before cell phones became ordinary, and the issue can be reproduced on every cell phone from every manufacturer, as well as ordinary radios, and anything that uses an antenna. But I didn't remotely think to try to attack Motorola for personal benefit. I just set the phone down when signal was weak and used bluetooth for data or calls, eliminating the issue, which wasn't Apple's fault and is apparently due to the limitations of antennas.
Singling out Apple was ignorant and deceptive, and fundamentally, Steve Jobs was correct about what that guy was doing, intentionally holding it in an unnatural way in order to produce the effect. That entire affair was nothing but a hatchet job that had nothing to do with user satisfaction and everything to do with negative and toxic personalities that irrationally believe they can gain personal satisfaction by causing misery. The most insidious types of mental illness are those where the mentally ill individual themselves do not suffer, instead they are compelled to make others suffer, which is how narcissism is generationally sustained.
That'd be compelling, except it started as wide-spread intemittent reports that the signal strength was just awful, but only for some people. This came up before anyone had any explanation yet, so couldn't possibly have been caused by a youtube video with a particular grip.
Turns out you just have to bridge a gap in the exposed antenna, there's no insane death grip required. It happens way more for left-handed people.
If it happens for every phone and every manufacturer equally, why/how did Apple fix it with a case?
But I really think the problem had to do with bridging that space in the antenna with a conductive material, such as the skin on fingers. The case merely provided a few mm of room for the signal to be able to squeeze through, plus it insulated conductive skin to prevent electrical bridging and deattenuation of the antenna.
Having owned an iPhone 4, I personally never experienced the problem beyond the same exact issue I experienced with a Motorola v551, which is that when placed on a table untouched, the signal strength increased, but then touching or holding it, the signal strength decreased. This can be reliably reproduced over and over again with any cell phone in an area of weak signal. Something about the conductivity of human skin interferes with attenuation of embedded antennas, and this has been true from the first cell phones with embedded antennas and is true of all modern cell phones, that in an area of weak cell signal, any skin contact will reduce signal strength and show one or more fewer bars of signal strength until skin contact is removed.
Apple conceded to a flaw in the design and settled a class action lawsuit, but apparently a few are still needy enough to require Apple be punished forever. The complainers had nothing to compare it to, so they were all, all of them, merely mistaken, the flaw exists in all cell phones with embedded antenna. Instead of proving them all wrong, which would have been academic, Apple laid down. What more would you like them to do?
So, in summary: they fucked up and had a really stupid response, right? I'm failing to see what part of that isn't fair.
> What more would you like them to do?
Nothing. It's just funny. They should probably avoid being ridiculous if they don't want memes about them to exist?
Straw man fallacy. Not everything is so simple. Even though all cell embedded antenna suffer from the same or similar flaw of deattenuating signal when held as opposed to being placed on a grounded surface in conditions of poor cell signal, perhaps the tactic applied was to avoid consumer resentment. Perhaps the legal costs of proving innocence and the common flaw among all similar devices was vastly more than paying the settlement. In fact, I am sure that was the case. Apple took the more equitable high road.
>> What more would you like them to do?
> Nothing. It's just funny. They should probably avoid being ridiculous if they don't want memes about them to exist?
This is merely schadenfreude. Do not believe that it is so that you will find happiness in the misery of others. To do so denies that Karma is never broken, or if you prefer, denies the validity of Newton's 3rd Law of Motion.
Self-esteem has a negative relationship with the frequency and intensity of schadenfreude experienced by an individual; individuals with less self-esteem tend to experience schadenfreude more frequently and intensely.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude
You're welcome to patronize whoever you want as a customer, but from a business perspective this is the sort of behavior that will be heavily scrutinized during antitrust hearings.
So, you admin Apple isn’t the only one. I think you can find examples from any company, especially the publicly traded ones.
Similarly, you’ll never hear a CEO say their new product is decent while the previous one was so-so. The new one always is better, and the old one doesn’t get mentioned, but is implied to be good.
> this is the sort of behavior that will be heavily scrutinized during antitrust hearings.
I doubt it. Even if Apple were exceptional in making this kind of statements, what’s anti-competitive in making them, or in making bad products?
> What exactly would you expect in this case?
Not pretending it's the user's fault they built the phone wrong. That's just extreme arrogance on their side.
Given Garmin’s long, long history as a manufacturer of (often very small) GPS devices, I personally wouldn’t be.
(I also know for a fact they do mapping better. This summer I was in the South of Italy and only Garmin accurately distinguished between small public roads and long private driveways while both Google and Apple royally messed this up.)
BTW the Fitbit Ionic GPS stopped working and now (if it didn't expire) I will go for the health (battery) recall: https://help.fitbit.com/en_US/ionic.htm and give them to another person. This will be the second replacement since this model stopped working after 1 yr of use and Fitbit sent me a new one.
The author said their watch worked fine in the past. It also works fine after a warm up period, which suggests it’s not getting a GPS lock at the start of the workout.
It’s a new issue of either a software regression, hardware degradation, or RF interference near their start point.
I think the Ultra watches now have an option to wait for a fix before starting (which is what always happens on the Garmin's).
But if you have a clear line of sight that's a different issue. I went cycling on a path next to a river and the GPS trace was buttery smooth.
GPS.gov says single band receivers should be able to get less than 2m accuracy. Dual band units, like the latest Garmin Forerunner watches, can do much, much better.
But also, cyclists are less concerned about specific speeds.
What you're saying makes sense, of course. I found some hundreds of meters of discrepancies in some rides (Apple Watch 4 vs. Karoo 2). Less than 1% of the total distance, of course.
Given that the “erratic mode” only impacts the beginning of the run and disappears suddenly at known locations, this sounds like an issue of delayed GPS lock.
And given that the problem didn’t exist in the past, it could be a software issue due to upgrades. Or it could be a hardware issue that developed over time, such as something impacting GPS receive sensitivity. Or it could even be a new source of RF interference in the GPS range near the author’s start point, which impacts GPS lock until they get far enough away from it.
Interesting issue, but note that this issue appears to be specific to this one specific person, not a general issue with all Apple Watches as some in this thread are speculating. I certainly have not noticed this behavior on my Watch even with the latest updates.
Based on this article they've fixed it for Ultra, at least https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2022/09/apple-watch-ultra-in-dep...
> Assuming you’re ready to go, then you’ve got two choices with Apple Watch Ultra. You could go the ‘normal’ route for all Apple Watches up till now, and wait for the 3-second countdown. Once that countdown completes, it’s at that point that the watch goes off and gets GPS signal and HR acquisition – not before. However, the Ultra edition includes a new ‘Precision Start’ feature, that lets you first open the workout up, then see the signal status before you begin
I’ve had a few instances where the running track gets all wonky when I go through something like a long underpass tunnel. It’s long enough to miss a GPS signal for many minutes. Instead, it guesses where I am based on distance to cell towers (I think). Or at least, that’s what the running trace seemed like to me. Everytime I went under a tunnel, I found out later that I ran a 3 minute mile — on miles 16, 20, and 22 (that’s not possible).
Now I just disable Bluetooth on my watch entirely while doing long runs. I’ve found the watch by itself to be more accurate, in general.
Seems like a lawsuit incoming due to "ruined health" by overstating measured activities.
The only thing that I need to know the accurate distance is to train a specific event, e.g. mile run, 5k, or 10k.
If I train to run a mile within four minutes, all I need to know is to run 60s for each 400m on track.
It’s also nice when you want to do any sort of interval training without actually going to a track.
Having accurate overall distances is less important, but is useful if you’re training for a specific distance and want to run some time trials without using a track or measured course.
I tend to plan my pacing for equal effort, so each lap pace is adjusted for elevation such that in the end the overall pace is just slightly faster than what is needed for goal pace.
Needless to say, I use my Garmin Forerunner 945 for this.
If anyone is running the Seattle Marathon, I'll be there pacing :)
If you're tracking incremental progress than such variability makes the data less useful. But that's why I prefer to use natural landmarks and a stopwatch - the smart watches I've used so far are off to the point where I don't trust them.
This also lowered the avg HR for the workout on the whoop, as you noted. Happy to share an example comparison graph if you’re interested, just reach out.
For what it’s worth, I ended up cancelling the Whoop this month after trying twice to engage with their data team.
> Russia (GLONASS) may intentionally give wrong results in your area. Try switching to just GPS, or GPS & Galileo.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/vo9w0l/comment/ied5...
But maybe it changed on iOS 16?
Solution: Tether with IPhone before leaving until fix is achieved, otherwise keep watch outside or near a window for 10-15 minutes before running so that it can update its almanac from overhead satellites and get a fix.
There is no software solution. Buy a newer watch with cellular connectivity and aGPS-support.
Otherwise, newer OS versions could have degraded the fix algorithm for older Watch-models.
If newer hardware comes with cellular connectivity, newer OS version could assume that by default and not prioritise (or test) backward compatibility with older Watch-models.
And why it couldn't load that data for say month ahead ?
Um, that’s very fast. At my pace (8:45 or 5:26 in km), I barely notice the discrepancies on my Apple Watch 7.
It just doesn't work.
- Sleep for 3h - wake up for 1, sleep for 5 more: records 3h only.
- (being a parent of a small baby) do not sleep at all during the night, sleep 4+3 hours during the day: 0 hours recorded
- sleep trough the night but wake up every 90-100 minutes (baby again): 0 hours recorded
Damn, this is a $500+ device, and it cant even get basic sleep data correctly. Also, it takes anywhere from 1min to couple of hours for data to appear in the Health app.
OTOH my wife has ~3 year old Huawei Fit watch, which was about $120, and that thing records every 10-15min or longer nap. Without a mistake.
It integrates with Health, so it has the bonus of tidying up the sleep data all across the board.
Not related to the developer in any way, just a very happy user.
Installing it right away!
I've been using it since before WatchOS 7 introduced sleep tracking, and it's scarily accurate even at tracking when I doze off for a short while in bed.
One really valuable thing it has highlighted for me is how much of a negative impact alcohol has on my sleep quality. Very eye-opening. And I would have never known this without AutoSleep.
> You either know you are getting restful sleep or know you are not...I’d imagine you would feel it, statistics or not.
How I feel doesn't always correlate with good sleep. It's just one variable. Knowing whether my sleep is good lets me know that I should be looking at other problems.
Or, in some cases, I am in bed for eight hours, but the quality of my sleep by the numbers is bad. It's not that I'm not getting enough sleep, it's that something is affecting my sleep. Spicy food too late in the evening? Too much caffeine? Not enough hydration throughout the day? It's hard to be mindful of the things that make my sleep worse unless I actually know when my sleep wasn't great.
Not true. A lot of people with chronic sleep problems (e.g. sleep apnea) feel tired during the day but have no idea why, and don't wake up during the night or have any other direct symptoms that would lead them to have a strong hypothesis for "bad sleep" being the root cause.
When I hit the snooze button on my phone and go back to sleep for another hour, both my Garmin and Oura are inconsistent whether that extra hour counts as sleep or not.
Garmin's even weirder than most as it asks you for your normal sleep hours when setting up the watch, which suggests that it's not as smart as it should be.
Garmin, to its credit, is slowly moving away from pure sleep tracking and using other metrics like HRV, stress, and yesterday's activity levels to calculate readiness for today's workout.
I wear my watch 23/7. It charges in the morning when I’m in the shower.
Only after an extra sporty day with a lot of sports tracking will I need to let it charge an extra 30 minutes or so extra during that day.
I've found if my watch is too loose it won't record sleep well.
It's also a known problem that Apple watches "backup" bugs (which I've experienced twice now). If the problem still continues, I'd recommend you fully unpair/reset your watch and setup it up as a new watch (do not restore from backup).
From his latest reviews of the new apple watches, heart rate is pretty much on par with chest strap and sleep tracking is also far better than anything he tested.
Apple Watch : Scientific Sleep Test - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPqtfC70QTU