[HN Gopher] My thousand dollar iPhone can't do math
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       My thousand dollar iPhone can't do math
        
       Author : rafaelcosta
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2026-02-01 20:51 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (journal.rafaelcosta.me)
 (TXT) w3m dump (journal.rafaelcosta.me)
        
       | bri3d wrote:
       | I love to see real debugging instead of conspiracy theories!
       | 
       | Did you file a radar? (silently laughing while writing this, but
       | maybe there's someone left at Apple who reads those)
        
       | the_arun wrote:
       | Is it a clickbait? Can't it do math or run llm?
        
         | bri3d wrote:
         | Somewhere along the line, the tensor math that runs an LLM
         | became divergent from every other Apple device. My guess is
         | that there's some kind of accumulation issue here (remembering
         | that floating-point accumulation does not usually commute), but
         | it seems genuinely broken in an unexpected way given that
         | Apple's own LLM also doesn't seem to work on this device.
        
         | ploum wrote:
         | Well it seems that, those days, instead of
         | SUM(expense1,expense2) you ask an LLM to "make an app that will
         | compute the total of multiple expenses".
         | 
         | If I read most of the news on this very website, this is "way
         | more efficient" and "it saves time" (and those who don't do it
         | will lose their job)
         | 
         | Then, when it produces wrong output AND it is obvious enough
         | for you to notice, you blame the hardware.
        
           | bri3d wrote:
           | I mean, Apple's LLM also doesn't work on this device, plus
           | the author compared the outputs from each iterative
           | calculation on this device vs. others and they diverge from
           | every other Apple device. That's a pretty big sign that both,
           | something is different about that device, and this same
           | broken behavior carried across multiple OS versions. Is the
           | hardware or the software "responsible" - who knows, there's
           | no smoking gun there, but it does seem like something is
           | genuinely wrong.
           | 
           | I don't get the snark about LLMs overall in this context;
           | this author uses LLM to help write their code, but is also
           | clearly competent enough to dig in and determine why things
           | don't work when the LLM fails, and performed an LLM-out-of-
           | the-loop debugging session once they decided it wasn't
           | trustworthy. What else could you do in this situation?
        
       | Buttons840 wrote:
       | I clicked hoping this would be about how old graphing calculators
       | are generally better math companions than phone.
       | 
       | The best way to do math on my phone I know of is the HP Prime
       | emulator.
        
       | vanviegen wrote:
       | Perfect conclusion: my expensive and rather new phone is broken
       | by design, so I just buy an even newer and more expensive one
       | from the same vendor.
        
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       (page generated 2026-02-01 23:00 UTC)