[morganw]

> I can buy a $10 microchip that's the size of a dime that can do it. Give it electricity, wait 15 minutes, the location comes out the other side.

How do you know when the 15 minutes starts, though? Dedicated GPSs tell you things like how many satellites they have in view and how accurate their fix is, but dumbed-down devices like to pretend location is magic. I'd hope they'd at least provide the gritty details through CoreLocation so a user can buy an app if she wants to know which bench outside the train station to sit at sipping coffee while the phone orients itself.

[bigiain]

You don't need to know "when it starts", it transmits in a loop, you need to collect ~12.5 minutes of that loop to get the entire almanac. (lousy software _might_ not understand unless it finds some particular preset mark in the loop, but it's not a GPS system architecture problem)

[morganw]

The user needs to know when the almanac is being received and when the whole thing is in when looking for a clear-view-of-sky spot to sit a while.

The best you can do with CoreLocation is set desiredAccuracy to kCLLocationAccuracyBest and wait for it to fall below 100 feet with no way to find out if it ever will.