Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Amazon Can Now Deliver Your Next iPhone With a Drone

Fuzzball84 said:
Phoenix, during daylight hours?

Are the packages insulated? The heat would cook your device during delivery.

I imagine the drones must be designed to deal with the heat too

🥵
Click to expand...
How do the packages that are currently left at someone’s door survive the heat?

The use case for this would be when delivery van stops in a neighborhood, the drones would fly from the van to drop small things off in areas inaccessible to porch pirates while the driver is dropping off the bigger items the drones can’t carry. Upon return, the drones would get more items to deliver in the area or set down on their storage dock for charging to be ready when the van gets to its next area with deliveries. If it’s just a bunch of small deliveries, the driver would just need to park in a central spot and let the drones do the delivery.
 
So, um, hi. I actually live next door to College Station (in Bryan, the other half of what the locals call "BCS") and still work in College Station. To quickly speak to a few things I'm seeing in the comments or elsewhere:
  1. Deliveries are expanding beyond College Station, which I haven't seen reported in the news yet. They were limited to only certain parts of College Station for years, but my wife and I each got an email from Amazon in the last month saying that we could now do drone deliveries for certain products, despite being in a fairly outlying part of Bryan.
    1. While we haven't taken advantage of it yet, Amazon has apparently also upgraded the technology in the last few years. It used to be the case that my friends who had done it would have to put a sheet down on their yard to indicate where the drone should land. The new drones don't need that any more and they're also significantly quieter, apparently.
    2. We aren't being swarmed. I've only ever seen one of their drones flying. Ever. Despite living and working in the area. The folks in south College Station are doubtless seeing more of them, but I haven't heard anyone complain.
  2. Land is cheap here because we're basically a suburb with ~300K people dropped in the middle of nowhere. Seriously, look it up on a map. It's a suburb without the "urb" next door. It's also why companies like Amazon like setting up shop here.
  3. Folks trying to apply stereotypes will be disappointed to hear that BCS tends to defy them, at least at the population level. Sure, we have rednecks here, just like anywhere else (be honest with yourself), but we also have a HUGE international population (we're home to the largest university/research institution in the US). We have nuclear reactors on-campus. One of our friends is a retired astronaut who did four flights. Major shows frequently stop here. We have a great food scene. A banking tycoon billionaire owns the subdivision next to ours (he has it all to himself), but if we keep walking past his place, we hit a country club golf course (complete with waterfall and 10,000 sqft mansions across the street), followed by cattle ranches, all within about 10 minutes of walking.
  4. With the university here and a population dominated by a culture of exploration and discovery, the area and its populace are already used to participating in experiments. We like it. It's part of the fun of living here (e.g. has your asphalt gotten a few dB quieter in the last decade or so where you live? we've had quieter asphalt here since the '90s, since that was a Texas A&M research project).
 
  • Like
Reactions: 2DeedleD
JohnC1959 said:
I really can't see the advantage of a drone for delivery. Because it can't carry much it must fly all the way from some supply location to the customer for a single delivery then all the way back to pickup an item for another single customer flight. It very likely needs to get a recharge (or battery swap) for every delivery. And in the process it's annoying everyone it flies over.
Click to expand...
I doubt drones would fly out of a fulfillment facility. More likely they will fly out from a delivery carrier that houses 20-30 drones. The driver just need to drive through the neighborhood and the drones fly off, deliver and return. it would save time because the driver won't have to stop at each location.
JohnC1959 said:
Fill a truck with many packages and pick an efficient route and it's much more efficient.
Click to expand...
I think Amazon already picked out the most efficient route before the truck leaves the distribution center.
JohnC1959 said:
And getting a new iphone is pretty much never an emergency needing immediate delivery.
Click to expand...
Speak for yourself.
907359a6912b2c47d12a0dfb2bbcea2d82b560893ce67cb3c5ea571e757c23d4_1.jpg
 
  • Haha
Reactions: arlomedia
How hard is it to get off your backside and go buy your iPhone from an actual shop that provides jobs and income to your town or city.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: JTK Awesome
tornadowrangler said:
While in the 1960s, they didn't have high expectations for our advancements in computers, from what I've read they did think we would be far more advanced in things like space, medicine, transportation, and energy production, than we currently are.
Click to expand...
I wasn’t around in the 60s but I think we were all supposed to be using flying cars by now.
 
Good to know. It will take a long time before the service expands to more regions and definitely expanding outside US maybe even a longer time away.
 
  • Like
Reactions: mganu
Rogue AI said:
Why would we want this?
Click to expand...
Speed and no drivers being dicks by throwing packages about, or handing it to the wrong address.

Would be great if I order something on Amazon, and it’s delivered by drone within 1 hour. I’m only a 10 minute drive from an Amazon warehouse, so a drone that can fly to me in a straight line, avoiding all traffic and with zero other people to deliver to at a decent speed could be with me pretty quickly.

Just deliver it to my back garden even if the gate is locked, and off it goes again, easier, faster and safer.
 
Fuzzball84 said:
The more congested the skies the more likely something will drop. And these drones are substantial.

I can imagine severe injury or worse should one malfunction and fall

I’d happily stick to ground based deliveries to keep everyone as safe as possible. None of my deliveries are worth more than someone’s health or life.
Click to expand...
Totally nuts, noisy, dangerous and unnecessary.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Fuzzball84
The law would have to be changed in the U.K for that to happen here, dronbe users have to keep their drones in sight.,
 
  • Like
Reactions: Fuzzball84
Fuzzball84 said:
The more congested the skies the more likely something will drop. And these drones are substantial.

I can imagine severe injury or worse should one malfunction and fall

I’d happily stick to ground based deliveries to keep everyone as safe as possible. None of my deliveries are worth more than someone’s health or life.
Click to expand...
We've run extensive analysis on this subject. There are a lot of factors to consider when calculating the Expected casualties (Ec) for drone operations over the public, including sheltering, angle of impact, mass of the drone, and area of impact (head, neck, thorax, etc). Ultimately, the FAA (and other regulatory bodies) typically aim for a probability of casualty around 1 in a million (1E-06). Certain types of activities (such as air passenger transport) have higher thresholds (1 in a billion). This is widely considered to be acceptable by the public at large. Which is to say, yes, someone might get hurt, but no, it won't be common enough to spark public outrage.
 
  • Disagree
Reactions: OverTheHill and Fuzzball84
Scoob Redux said:
We've run extensive analysis on this subject. There are a lot of factors to consider when calculating the Expected casualties (Ec) for drone operations over the public, including sheltering, angle of impact, mass of the drone, and area of impact (head, neck, thorax, etc). Ultimately, the FAA (and other regulatory bodies) typically aim for a probability of casualty around 1 in a million (1E-06). Certain types of activities (such as air passenger transport) have higher thresholds (1 in a billion). This is widely considered to be acceptable by the public at large. Which is to say, yes, someone might get hurt, but no, it won't be common enough to spark public outrage.
Click to expand...

Would you be outraged if it was your child that got hurt or worse? Would it be acceptable?

Or would you stand there and say your kid was just an “expected casualty”?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Ad47uk
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back