[HN Gopher] Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away
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Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away
Author : ColinWright
Score : 128 points
Date : 2025-12-14 13:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mathstodon.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (mathstodon.xyz)
| 1317 wrote:
| context?
| Daneel_ wrote:
| Seems like the author of the linked post has a lost airtag
| located in the abyss.
| numbsafari wrote:
| It's sitting next to Apple's values.
| Etheryte wrote:
| The distance is more than the circumference of the Earth. If
| you wrapped a rope around the planet at the equator, the length
| would be around 25k miles.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| Sure. However, if the road around the planet goes to Everest
| and back, the total length of travel will exceed the
| circumference of the planet.
| lxgr wrote:
| Some roads aren't perfectly straight (not that this seems
| like it could explain what happened in this particular case).
| Etheryte wrote:
| That's fair, but even the commonly cited longest route [0]
| you could theoretically walk without intentional detours,
| Cape Town, South Africa to Magadan, Russia, is
| approximately 14k miles.
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/a2mcjq/21212_
| km_fr...
| mapmeld wrote:
| I went back to their posts in November for this
|
| > One of my AirTags is inexplicably 1600 miles away in Texas.
| It's one of my floating ones that I throw into bags when
| traveling as needed.
|
| > Maybe it dropped out of my bag only to be found by someone
| who thought it'd be fun to confuse the owner. Or maybe it
| became e-waste to be dumped in another country.
| zkmon wrote:
| Actual distance about 3.2k miles plus equator length of 25k miles
| plus what else?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Altitude
| websiteapi wrote:
| Oh wow, a _bug_
| MiscIdeaMaker99 wrote:
| Except this one is not on the windshield.
| sva_ wrote:
| In Apple Maps? Unpossible!
| MiscIdeaMaker99 wrote:
| Looks like a bug that I hope someone will have a fun time fixing.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I think the developers didn't account for lost AirTags many
| hundreds of miles away. And that long calculation was not the
| best.
| srean wrote:
| You wouldn't imagine ...
|
| I have seen API calls you people wouldn't believe.
|
| Requests hanging off the edge of the load balancer, Ethernet
| tubes glittering in the dark.
|
| Latency logs reporting some API calls that took longer than the
| age of the universe.
|
| Their means and percentiles burning on the shoulders of weekly
| reports.
|
| Plot points dying at the edge of y axis
|
| ... like tears in the rain.
| Angostura wrote:
| Time to reboot
| srean wrote:
| Indeed and Voigt-Kampf the signed from the unsigned,
| dynamic types from static.
| rebolek wrote:
| Fixing bugs. At Apple. OK.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| Directions suggest an average speed over 500 mph. Not bad for
| driving.
| pushedx wrote:
| It is easily 29,905 road miles away.
|
| If you put all of your blood vessels end to end they would go to
| the moon and back.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Being a little bit clever can lead you to make some pretty bad
| mistakes.
|
| Yes, the distance according to roads can be different from the
| distance as the crow flies. No, it cannot realistically be 10x
| the distance when the crow's distance is 2500 miles.
| meindnoch wrote:
| But what if you count the distance of going in and out of
| each tiny crack on the road surface?
| scrame wrote:
| Look up "fractal dimensions".
| meindnoch wrote:
| I know :)
| thfuran wrote:
| You would have to take an implausible number of wrong turns to
| have a chance of making it anywhere near that long a drive. For
| an example of a shorter but still entirely unreasonable path:
| Head straight north all the way to the pole, continue south to
| the pole, continue north to the latitude of the destination,
| then head due east until arrival.
| jb1991 wrote:
| I question your use of the word "easily".
| handsclean wrote:
| The flight distance is 2,520 miles, Google puts road distance
| at 3,179 mi = 1.26x, 29,905 mi is 11.87x. Road miles are not
| even close to accounting for it, it's just a bug.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > If you put all of your blood vessels end to end they would go
| to the moon and back.
|
| The moon orbits too quickly to make this practical
| monerozcash wrote:
| While we're on the subject of maps-related bugs, I was recently
| borrowing a new Tesla Model Y and took it on a RORO ferry. After
| the crossing, the car's GPS was convinced I was still at the port
| where I had departed from. I restarted it a couple of times, but
| nothing. I drove off using Waze on my phone instead of the car's
| navigation. The map on the car kept moving relative to the
| direction I was driving, so the navigation was showing me driving
| into the sea and eventually started complaining that it would be
| impossible to find a charger.
|
| Approximately 5 hours later, just as I was about to arrive, the
| car finally managed to figure out my correct location.
|
| Exciting trip, not a huge fan of Teslas, but their charger
| planning is really nice. It was very unpleasant to suddenly lose
| it.
|
| I just genuinely wonder how such a bug can actually occur, surely
| you'd update the GPS fix more often than every couple of hours.
| Hard to imagine the car just suddenly couldn't get a GPS fix for
| hours either. But if it did somehow totally lose the ability to
| use GPS, the car must have a pretty good dead reckoning system
| given how well it was responding to my changes in direction.
|
| On a vaguely related note, driving 3000 kilometers through Europe
| in an electric car was surprisingly nice. Certainly didn't affect
| the length of the trip nearly as much as I'd have expected, but
| it was certainly super annoying to try and figure out the optimal
| rate of travel on the Autobahn. Charging at Tesla's supercharges
| was vastly more expensive than I expected, the "fuel" costs
| weren't much lower than what you could easily reach with a diesel
| car.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Possibly it was using WPS keyed to the ferry's WiFi and didn't
| consider the possibility that the ferry itself could move out
| of where it was registered (ie, the port)?
| monerozcash wrote:
| I drove away from the ferry and passed lots of WiFi APs on
| the way, presumably it should have figured out the new
| location pretty quick with WPS.
| kijin wrote:
| Perhaps the car is programmed to ignore all external
| signals for a while if it detects significant disagreement
| for a prolonged time, as might have happened if it had
| access to both WPS and GPS during the ferry ride. In such
| cases it would be safe to assume that something is being
| spoofed, and fall back to INS.
| Liftyee wrote:
| I wonder if it's using a compass and odometry (distance) with
| dead reckoning. A strange choice when GPS is available, but it
| would account for the map moving in the car's direction and it
| not changing locations when it moved without rolling (ferry).
| billyjmc wrote:
| Almost certainly. GPS is not only easily jammed, but easily
| spoofed. If the car believed GPS instead of its own eyes, so
| to speak, then there's significant potential that you'd see
| glitches more often. It could also be something of a safety
| risk when using its self-driving capabilities.
| bragr wrote:
| In addition to sibling's comments about jamming and self
| driving safety, there are many driving situations where there
| is no or poor GPS reception: tunnels, double deck bridges,
| double deck freeways, underpasses, urban canyons, actual
| canyons, etc. Also regional problems. The GPS constellation
| is in a 55deg inclination, so if you are north of ~55N, or
| south of ~55S, you need a clear view of the southern/northern
| sky, respectfully, for reception, since there will be no
| overhead satellites.
| stockresearcher wrote:
| I had a Volvo XC90 that "jumped" off the interstate and onto a
| parallel mountain road east of Knoxville. It did its best to
| track along those roads and somehow made its way into North
| Carolina. But even when I was back in Chicago, it was still
| stuck in NC trying to find a way off those mountain roads.
| Dozens of on/off cycles did nothing. I disconnected the battery
| overnight and that didn't work. At the next service
| appointment, the dealer had to do a full firmware reset to wipe
| the memory and get it working again.
|
| It amazed me that Volvo programmed an SUV to disbelieve that it
| could ever actually leave a road.
| kijin wrote:
| My dad used to have a crappy aftermarket GPS in his car that
| did the same thing. It would get lost dozens of miles away,
| and then hundreds of miles away.
|
| The explanation I found online at the time was that a GPS
| receiver needs to download data about the exact orbits of all
| GPS satellites from time to time. Satellites slowly lose
| altitude and change their orbits. Up-to-date information is
| constantly broadcasted by every satellite, but it takes about
| 15 minutes for a device on the ground to download this
| dataset.
|
| Most GPS devices do this automatically whenever they get the
| chance. But if your GPS is somehow unable to stay online for
| 15 consecutive minutes (bad firmware, faulty memory, tunnels,
| underground parking lots, etc), it will be relying on
| increasingly outdated info and drift far off its actual
| location.
| pbmonster wrote:
| There's no way a modern smart phone or car relies on those
| ephemeris transmissions. They all just get it from the
| internet, which takes less than a second. That's one of the
| reasons why a smart phone has a reliable GPS fix basically
| instantly after being booted up, while old-school offline
| GPS units needed minutes to get a fix.
| malfist wrote:
| _deleted incorrect statement_
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Well, that's certainly not the case. Each satellite
| transmits a low-precision almanac to the receiver that
| helps it lock onto the others, as well as a higher-
| resolution ephemeris that provides the necessary
| pseudorange accuracy for that particular SV.
|
| But it's true that neither of those factors accounts for
| miles of error. That has to come down to either poor sky
| coverage/signal strength, poor software, or (more likely)
| both.
| malfist wrote:
| You are correct, there's several words of data at the end
| of the packet that is a low precision almanac
| kccqzy wrote:
| That's only the case for non-internet connected GPS units.
| Throwback to the early 2000s when my family car had such a
| unit, which, after having been turned on, would require ~15
| minutes of waiting before it became functional. Funnily, I
| remember the mapping app would refuse to use the device
| clock and only use the time from GPS satellites. So at
| least you would know you need to wait if it didn't know the
| current time.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Last summer traveling down a rural road in southwestern
| Ontario, Apple maps told me to return to the route. We hadn't
| turned in 10 kilometers, but it was showing that we were 200
| meters into a cornfield.
|
| I don't think I could have ended up there if I tried in the
| Golf we were in. Nice try.
|
| My kids thought it was the funniest thing, but it's a good
| technology lesson.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The problem is that roads are continually being built and
| maps aren't always as quick to be updated.
|
| There are also private paths that aren't public roads but are
| still intended for vehicles.
| theamk wrote:
| That's no excuse for disbelieving GPS for extended periods
| of time.
|
| Google Maps gets it right: it tried to keep you on road,
| but only for a few tens of seconds. After that, if you are
| in the middle of uncharted territory, it'll show the marker
| there.
|
| (This is probably because Google Maps can be used for
| walking/biking too)
| UebVar wrote:
| >(This is probably because Google Maps can be used for
| walking/biking too)
|
| Please don't do that. The map is simply not good enough
| and does not have enough context (road quality, terrain,
| trail difficulty) for anything but very causal activity.
| Even then I highly recommend to use a proper map,
| electronic or paper.
| jonahrd wrote:
| yeah I'm not gonna open some paid trail map or buy a
| paper map so I can walk across my local city park and
| give my friends a pin to find me...
| i80and wrote:
| I've found Organic Maps to be better than any paid app
| for hiking (and I've tried a bunch) for what it's worth
| dizhn wrote:
| We used the walking directions for dual sport motorcycles
| once. It was pretty nice. We did have a few places where
| it became sketchy. Those and maybe more places would be
| sketchy for walking too. Not that google maps could do
| much about it. Terrain is a living thing. These were
| mostly huge cracks in the earth due to rain water.
| circuit10 wrote:
| Trail? Terrain? I use it for walking for 10-20mins around
| a (mostly flat) city and I expect that's what 90% of
| people use it for, the comment didn't mention hiking
| murkt wrote:
| Well, when I'm driving in Kyiv, and there is an air raid
| alert, usually my car navigation starts to derp, and
| after a few minutes it thinks that it's suddenly in Lima,
| Peru.
|
| Not that I mind too much, I know how to get around
| without navigation.
| stefan_ wrote:
| It does teleport to Peru but it also fast-forwards time
| to about a year into the future, which caused my car to
| think its overdue for that oil change. It even synced
| that back to the headquarters and I got an email asking
| me to take it to service.. (and arriving there on the
| wrong side of the Dnieper, I just decided to wait it out)
|
| Wish we could put it into a manual mode where you just
| reset it's position once and then it updates based on
| wheel encoders & snapping to roads.
| AlphaAndOmega0 wrote:
| GPS jamming for incoming drones?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > That's no excuse for disbelieving GPS for extended
| periods of time.
|
| You've got it backwards. I was explaining why GPS
| _should_ take priority over mapping data. Not the other
| way around.
| circuit10 wrote:
| They're saying that not prioritising (disbelieving) GPS
| data is bad, hence there's no excuse for it
|
| So that's the same thing you're saying
| worewood wrote:
| A badly programmed Kalman filter perhaps
| pjdesno wrote:
| In Boston it's a very frequent occurrence to be driving in
| the Central Artery Tunnel and have your map software think
| you're on the surface, or vice versa, or to be on a highway
| overpass and again have it think you're on a surface road
| that is inaccessible from your location. You get used to it.
|
| This seems like an entirely different level of craziness,
| though.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Yeah I remember back in the early 2000s before phones had
| turn-by-turn navigation, there were PDAs to do it and it
| was common for the software to just ask whether you were
| driving on the surface road or an elevated viaduct.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > It amazed me that Volvo programmed an SUV to disbelieve
| that it could ever actually leave a road.
|
| Only for footpaths in residential areas.
|
| I wonder what class of vehicles is least likely to go off
| roading?
| technothrasher wrote:
| I remember cars in the early 2000's doing this. Haven't seen
| that behavior in years.
| bragr wrote:
| My guess would be:
|
| 1. Car entered ferry, loses GPS
|
| 2. Car entered dead reconning mode used for tunnels and such
|
| 3. Car left ferry, acquired GPS
|
| Then either:
|
| 4a. Location via dead reconning vasty disagreed with GPS
| because the car doesn't know about the ferry's movements,
| triggering some kind of failsafe.
|
| Or:
|
| 4b. There's just a plain old bug in the condition to switch
| back to GPS and maybe people haven't noticed because you don't
| get as badly desynced in a tunnel.
|
| >the car must have a pretty good dead reckoning system
|
| Yeah all the pieces are there: accelerometers and gyros for
| stability control, compass for navigation, and the wheel speed
| sensors give you exact distance traveled.
| toast0 wrote:
| My local roro ferry drops you off pretty close to downtown.
| If you don't get a good fix as you get off the boat before
| you get into the urban canyon, satnav is pretty hopeless for
| a few minutes.
|
| Doesn't usually take 5 hours to figure out where it is
| though. At least not on my vehicles, even the one that's
| always getting confused.
| raverbashing wrote:
| It probably doesn't do dead reckoning even in tunnels
|
| And maybe the system sucks to get the GPS almanac if badly
| desynced
| DonHopkins wrote:
| TomTom's have for at least 15 years or so. They have
| accelerometers to measure the motion when cut off from the
| GPS satellites. I worked there, knew the guy who developed
| it, and saw him give a presentation about it.
| mjlee wrote:
| I swapped out the satnav in a 2008 Honda for a modern unit
| and the car had a "speed pulse" wire. I looked it up and
| that wire is used for dead reckoning.
| kbutler wrote:
| Looks like others have reported similar issues. Entering a
| navigation route may help?
|
| https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/map-location-and-rou...
| monerozcash wrote:
| > Entering a navigation route may help?
|
| Didn't work for me.
| somenameforme wrote:
| A practical issue is that GPS can be spoofed relatively easily.
| If autonomous driving became a thing, and ubiquitous, with
| vehicles that prioritized remote over local consistency, then a
| single GPS spoof could cause some interesting things to happen.
| This is probably a concern that does drive decisions, at least
| to a degree. It creates a weird scenario where you kind of need
| to trust GPS, but you simultaneously also can't treat it as
| authoritative.
|
| OTOH creating a dumb user experience for a fairly common
| scenario, to try to preempt a hypothetical scenario is probably
| not a great idea. A fun problem to think about, though it may
| be completely unrelated to this issue.
| malfist wrote:
| If it becomes common place, spoofing is easy to counter.
| Directionality and parallax of the signal is enough to figure
| out the true signal, all it requires is an additional
| antenna.
|
| This won't prevent jamming, that requires a different
| mechanism, but spoofing should be prevented.
| pjsg wrote:
| I suspect that my Tesla adjusts its location based on dead
| reckoning after losing GPS lock _except_ that it assumes that I
| 'm driving forwards. I.e. If I reverse out of my garage, then
| the map ends up in the wrong place and now I'm driving parallel
| to the road!
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| As you're mentioning a RO/RO ferry, recently, and Europe... are
| you sure you weren't in a GPS-denied environment, where the car
| (correctly) detected that GPS was jammed or spoofed and ignored
| it?
| monerozcash wrote:
| It was further west than you typically see significant GPS
| jamming, and GPS on other devices was fine.
| jwr wrote:
| > On a vaguely related note, driving 3000 kilometers through
| Europe in an electric car was surprisingly nice.
|
| Having done a number of multiple-thousand km trips in Europe in
| an EV (not a Tesla, nobody buys those anymore) -- it's amusing
| how non-EV muggles think this is somehow an ordeal. It's just
| fine! There are drawbacks: you do have to use your brain and
| plan ahead more than you do when burning dinosaurs. But I found
| that the 20-30 minute stops every 2h really improve how I feel
| after a day or two of driving.
|
| Agreed about prices: there is gouging going on with some crazy
| margins. When charging at home, an EV is 2-4x less expensive
| per km than a gasoline-powered car, but when fast-charging on a
| road trip the cost of energy is nearly the same.
| zamalek wrote:
| > But I found that the 20-30 minute stops every 2h really
| improve how I feel after a day or two of driving.
|
| I honestly started considering this a feature. I am a huge
| believer in "productive friction" - where some things are
| intentionally made annoying or hard so that humans avoid them
| - and this is a really good example.
| jonathan7977 wrote:
| One hypothesis I can offer is that your car could not, for
| whatever reason, use assisted gps to download the almanach
| which relies on mobile networks. Gps devices that download the
| almanac via gps itself can take up to twelve hours (in higher
| latitudes i think)!
| namibj wrote:
| It doesn't just become invalid; almanac is good enough to use
| for satnav for over a day.
| kec wrote:
| Civilian GPS (as in, the DoD's Navstar) alone isn't accurate
| enough to actually place you on a specific road. To compensate,
| auto navigation systems will snap you to the nearest road
| parallel to your current heading. Tesla likely didn't consider
| the edge case of ferries and other off road situations in their
| mapping software and you hit some corner case bug.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| This used to be true, but the DoD turned off "selective
| availability" (the intentional degrading of the civilian
| signal) back in 2000, and the current generation of
| satellites do not have the capability
| (https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability). What they do
| have though is a separate, encrypted, military broadcast that
| can be used for those purposes (I think the plan in those
| situations is to turn off civilian GPS entirely - but I think
| that there's no reason for that, now, due to the other
| navigation systems like GLONASS).
| kec wrote:
| Even without selective availability gps is only accurate to
| within about 30' in normal urban conditions which is more
| than enough to punt you over to a side street without
| heuristics on top.
| testing22321 wrote:
| My farming GPS does this every time I ship it with my vehicle
| to a new continent.
|
| I always figured it has some code to get a quick location, and
| it assumes that location is very close to the last time it got
| a sat lock.
|
| I just ignore it for the first day, then it comes good.
| pjdesno wrote:
| Back in the days of MapQuest there was a (usually) very good
| site called mapsonus.com, but it evidently had one of the
| ferries that crossed Boston Harbor in its map as a zero
| distance link.
|
| Since it was offline, the bug was obvious although a bit
| frustrating - you had to put in multiple waypoints to make it
| forget its urge to send you on the ferry to Hull when you were
| trying to get to parts of the South Shore.
| amelius wrote:
| Loved the comment about the fractal shaped path.
| speedgoose wrote:
| 48 137 km.
| rzzzt wrote:
| 1.2 times the circumference of the Earth. Is space compressed
| between SF and Guatemala City somehow?
| derriz wrote:
| The most annoying thing about iPhone Maps for me is the
| inaccuracy of the direction indicator. I've googled and it
| doesn't seem to be a universal complaint even though I've
| experienced this on multiple devices over the years even after
| following instructions to re-calibrate multiple times. Maybe I've
| just been unlucky.
|
| It intensely frustrating to use maps for direction finding while
| walking or cycling when the app is telling you are facing one
| direction when in fact you are facing another.
| mertd wrote:
| That's a phone compass problem no? Perhaps the specific way
| you're holding the phone is confusing for the algorithm?
| cenamus wrote:
| You're holding it wrong part 2?
| morshu9001 wrote:
| On my past iPhones, the compass always got screwed up over time
| somehow. Sometimes recalibrating fixed it, but only for a
| minute.
| derriz wrote:
| Yep - exactly what I've experienced. Calibrate the compass
| and at least it's within a right angle of being correct. But
| the problem returns.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Was it serviced? In some models they used to have a non-
| ferrous screw put next to the compass, if a tech puts the
| wrong one in it will not calibrate.
| pashky wrote:
| Settings - privacy - location services - system services -
| compass calibration. Make sure it's enabled. In a bout of
| paranoia I disabled location for everything I didn't recognize
| as necessary and then it took me many months to find out why
| compass cone behaves funny in mapping apps.
| mmooss wrote:
| Tangentially, why won't computerized maps - e.g., Apple Maps,
| Google, etc. - show a scale? Generally they'll show one as you
| pinch/zoom, but it disappears when you release your fingers.
|
| Sometimes I just want to eyeball distances, and not plug in
| addresses and request routes for everything.
|
| I know not everyone always wants it, but a scale is a fundamental
| feature of mapping! Scale almost defines mapping.
|
| Edit: One reason I ask is because I suspect some technical
| limitation.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's purely a UI thing, the same (misguided) reason scrollbars
| disappear.
| pkolaczk wrote:
| I've had that bug a few times. I think it's related to some roads
| being closed and/ or under reconstruction. I've seen this happen
| multiple times on the same route, and it always fixed itself
| after I passed the construction site.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Context is confusing because we arrive in the middle of a story
| arc, at a point where an unrelated tech snafu happens.
|
| The story arc is about a lost airtag that is living it's secret
| life in Mexico.
|
| The link is for a post where Apple decides the distance to it's
| location in Mexico is greater than the circumference of the
| Earth.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Maps has gone backwards on CarPlay, too. Hysteresis is completely
| broken - I stop at a traffic light and the map will jump back and
| forth between two resolutions, often once a second, which is
| extremely distracting.
|
| I also love that Find My says my partner was "last seen" at home
| "8,912 days ago".
|
| Apple just doesn't give as much of a shit any more.
| 9dev wrote:
| Sidenote, I love spotting random binary numbers out on the wild
| ksherlock wrote:
| As one of the commenters pointed out, altitude.
|
| A geostationary orbit is ~26,000 miles. Dollars to donuts, that's
| where it is.
| pyrolistical wrote:
| Maybe they are running into
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
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(page generated 2025-12-14 20:00 UTC)