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Apple Executives Offer Closer Look at iPhone 14's Crash Detection
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Editors don't necessarily read all comments to articles posted by the professional staff. Per item #8 in the Minor Problems rules for MacRumors forums:
I’ve often found drinking yardbeers a good way to study wave mechanics.
Waiting for the story of a 911 call after someone tossed their pants containing an iPhone into a washer or dryer.
Meh. Apple shouldn't be drawing attention to a feature that's half baked at best, faulty at worst.
The should treat new features the same they did with water proofing a few years back. Not a peep out of Apple about the iPhone's water resistance. People found out and it blew up big...in a good way.
Apple needs to backburner the whole crash detection feature until they can get it working properly. Google was smart not to advertise their half baked crash detection years ago. If they want to add crash detection, it should be added to Car Play, not the iPhone. Y'all can't bring a Car Play console onto a rollercoaster.
The should treat new features the same they did with water proofing a few years back. Not a peep out of Apple about the iPhone's water resistance. People found out and it blew up big...in a good way.
Apple needs to backburner the whole crash detection feature until they can get it working properly. Google was smart not to advertise their half baked crash detection years ago. If they want to add crash detection, it should be added to Car Play, not the iPhone. Y'all can't bring a Car Play console onto a rollercoaster.
That is so grossly unfair and absurd. Apple developed a new feature to help people. They did a good job. But they can't think of everything no matter what. Only the perfect people posting here can be perfect and think of everything. This is simply Apple bashing for the sake of bashing and hate. Those who post stuff like this get immediately added to the ignore file. They will never have anything to say that I'd want to listen to. How can people use a product from a company that acts as egregiously as described in these kinds of statements?
Also 4. Since Covid, almost all amusement parks have their own dedicated apps for passes and tickets. Village Roadshow Themeparks use the app for ID and ticketing, Covid check-in, virtual queues, meal plans and discounts, park maps and schedules, etc. Apple could allow the theme park apps to allow a disable/enable feature and a reminder at the start and end of a day at the park.
This way apple doesn't need to track anyone using GPS, they can just use the park's apps to manage the feature. They could also have this disabled for 10-12 hours and then turn back on automatically.
There's a lot of easy ways this could be solved.
It’s enough to make you question if the human race will survive.
I haven’t noticed the ignore feature. I’ll have to look for it. It would be very useful for the exact reason you describe.
I wonder how this compares tp Pixel's crash detection.
That would have been an interesting question to have asked.
That would have been an interesting question to have asked.
I tend to think the roller coaster false positives are probably a result of numerous factors including speed, acceleration, deceleration, inversions and the G-forces... plus the general sounds of people screaming, since noise analysis is part of the equation.
Being a fan of roller coasters and operated one for 4 years, I can see the sudden braking being a primary driver, especially on rides that are ... more rugged (the stand-up roller coaster I operated was definitely a ride that made you feel like a rag doll especially on hot days where the trains ran faster - not a lot, but enough to impact it noticeable.)
I think the geofencing would be a good way to solve it as the parks are permanent fixtures in many cases... but upon further reflection, I think they could actually use the same sensor suite and actually determine they are on measuring a roller coaster since the mechanics of a roller coaster are pretty predictable. They may even be able to go so far as fingerprinting the roller coasters to the point of knowing which one you were on, if they collected enough empirical data on the various roller coasters.
I suppose this could also be applied to other amusement rides with similar impacts, although I suspect that the bumper cars were somewhat taken into account but coasters are much more powerful in terms of forces but may not have been considered "crash likely"
Also, I am not certain where highways run through parks (but I guess that is true somewhere) however in the theme parks themselves, they will have on-site loss prevention teams that would be the first responders to any incident on property. In this case geofencing would still work out since any real emergency should fall to the personnel trained to handle it there and if local emergency services are to be called, then the parks calls them. Airports are another place that crash detection could theoretically be an issue where geofencing could help and again airports have their own response teams.
Being a fan of roller coasters and operated one for 4 years, I can see the sudden braking being a primary driver, especially on rides that are ... more rugged (the stand-up roller coaster I operated was definitely a ride that made you feel like a rag doll especially on hot days where the trains ran faster - not a lot, but enough to impact it noticeable.)
I think the geofencing would be a good way to solve it as the parks are permanent fixtures in many cases... but upon further reflection, I think they could actually use the same sensor suite and actually determine they are on measuring a roller coaster since the mechanics of a roller coaster are pretty predictable. They may even be able to go so far as fingerprinting the roller coasters to the point of knowing which one you were on, if they collected enough empirical data on the various roller coasters.
I suppose this could also be applied to other amusement rides with similar impacts, although I suspect that the bumper cars were somewhat taken into account but coasters are much more powerful in terms of forces but may not have been considered "crash likely"
Also, I am not certain where highways run through parks (but I guess that is true somewhere) however in the theme parks themselves, they will have on-site loss prevention teams that would be the first responders to any incident on property. In this case geofencing would still work out since any real emergency should fall to the personnel trained to handle it there and if local emergency services are to be called, then the parks calls them. Airports are another place that crash detection could theoretically be an issue where geofencing could help and again airports have their own response teams.
Yes and No.
I along with others immediately thought of things like roller-coasters, bumper cars, various amusement park rides, bicycle crash, sky diving, skiing, etc...
I would be very surprised if every engineer missed these potential "false triggers". Especially considering the extent they went to perform car placement testing.
The thing is it that useful? Are there really statistically significant numbers of car accidents where the driver/passengers are incapacitated, there is no witness or other help, and there’s also phone signal?
It seems to me this has come primarily from a marketing standpoint. They knew that safety features such as fall detection were good for sales of the Watch and pushed for something safety related for the iPhone. And crash detection fit the bill.
Just look how heavily it was marketed at the keynote with mocked up crashes etc. This could have been a small additional feature but it was centre stage. Buy the new iPhone to save your life.
In reality it seems to be causing more problems that it solves.
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I think it's an overall good feature that could save some lives. If people keep encountering issues like riding rollercoasters, it might make sense to update and have it so people can turn it off and on.
Could be even simpler. A high G, almost instantaneous deceleration, followed my continuous movement for at least some number of seconds afterwards (perhaps 20) probably means you haven't crashed in your car.
Yes a good number of people among millions of users would probably have thought of this, but the teams working on specific features are typically not that large, so it's quite possible that some edge cases were missed during development. Let's say testing on roller coasters occurs to 5% of all people who are be told to create this feature. In a team of 20 that means just one person might think of it, making it all the more likely it would never come up at all.
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Unfortunately with these types of intelligent features it's just part of the process. Similar to self-driving algorithms, it's basically impossible to consider every possible scenario because there are limits to what engineers can predict and what they can test on in a controlled setting. For example, back when older MacBooks had spinning drives and needed an algorithm to detect sudden drops, the feature only needed to work with specify models of MacBooks on common surfaces. Car cash detection need to work with magnitudes more possibilities because of car configuration, environments, impacts, noises, etc.
Maybe we're asking the wrong question. Maybe a lot of these janky rollercoasters aren't safe. Plenty of people have been killed by poorly or negligently designed amusement park rides that have ****** safety records and little to no oversight by government safety groups.
Engineers have a hard time imagining how customer's can misuse the products they design because no sane engineer would do that themselves.