Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Apple Maps AirTag Distance Bug

  • Apple Maps reports an AirTag as ~29,905 miles away, exceeding Earth’s circumference, despite the actual straight-line distance being ~2,500–3,200 miles.
  • Commenters note road distance can exceed crow-flies distance (detours, elevation, non-straight roads) but not plausibly by a factor of ~12.
  • Some joke explanations reference altitude or geostationary orbit, but others point out altitude is negligible at this scale.

Speculated Causes

  • Hypothesis: routing engine summing an anomalously long route due to road closures or mis-marked segments (e.g., artificially inflated segment lengths to discourage routing).
  • Another suggestion: accumulated error from detailed road geometry or “fractal” measurement, but most find this insufficient to explain a 10x blowup.
  • Coastline-paradox–style arguments are mentioned and largely dismissed as too small an effect relative to the observed error.

Other Navigation / GPS Failure Stories

  • Multiple anecdotes of in-car nav getting “stuck”:
    • Tesla on a ferry continues to think it’s at the departure port for ~5 hours, showing the car driving through the sea and panicking about chargers.
    • Volvo and cheap aftermarket GPS units that latch onto the wrong road or region and stay there until a hard reset.
    • Devices jumping into fields, foreign countries, or staying on wrong roads due to aggressive “snap to road” behavior.
  • Explanations discussed:
    • Dead reckoning in tunnels/ferries using accelerometers, gyros, wheel sensors, and sometimes “speed pulse” wiring.
    • Conflicts between GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, and map data; possible anti-spoofing logic that distrusts sudden large jumps.
    • Almanac/ephemeris handling, assisted GPS via the internet vs satellite-only updates, and bad Kalman filter tuning.

UI and Map Quality Complaints

  • Apple Maps direction indicator on iPhone is reported as persistently inaccurate when walking/cycling; suspected compass issues and calibration settings.
  • CarPlay Maps allegedly has jittery zoom (broken hysteresis). Find My sometimes shows absurd timestamps.
  • Users lament the lack of a persistent scale bar in mainstream map apps, attributing it to minimalistic UI choices.

Broader Reflections

  • Some argue estimation/Fermi-question skills wouldn’t catch this kind of routing bug; it’s more about edge cases and data handling.
  • Thread mixes humor (fractal-path jokes, blood-vessel comparisons) with frustration and a sense that mapping and GPS systems still have many brittle corners.