[cianmm]

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.

[mtts]

> 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.)

[wslh]

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.

[PragmaticPulp]

> 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.

[pmuk]

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.

[stefan_]

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).

[8ytecoder]

Apple Watch uses the iPhone’s gps when the phone is close by.

[ldrndll]

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.

[water8]

Watch will use the phones GPS because it has a bigger battery unless you separate them and then it will use it on

[mpweiher]

The point of the watch is not needing to bring you phone...

[sjkelly]

Dual band GPS on my Garmin is certainly amazing. It is mind blowing seeing accuracy down to which side of the street I was on during a run.

[oezi]

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.

[workbytaylor]

Which app do you use to record runs on Apple watch? I've found Strava's own little app to be much more accurate than Apple's workout app.

[kadoban]

> 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.

[Clent]

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.

[kadoban]

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.

[Maursault]

> They'll be getting shit for that for decades.

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.

[kadoban]

> 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?

[Maursault]

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?

[xani_]

Ah yes, the issue only Apple had somehow couldn't be avoided, and yet fanboys like you defend

> 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.

[smoldesu]

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.

[Someone]

> 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?

[AmericanChopper]

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.