Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Apple Maps reportedly calculated an AirTag’s location as nearly 30,000 miles away—greater than Earth’s circumference—prompting analysis of how routing algorithms, road data, and numerical bugs can produce wildly incorrect distances. Commenters compare this to other navigation glitches in cars and phones, from Teslas stuck “on” ferries to GPS units that snap users to the wrong road or even continent, exploring factors like dead reckoning, satellite data, spoofing defenses, and map-update latency. The thread highlights how complex location stacks (GPS, Wi‑Fi, sensors, and map heuristics) can fail in edge cases, undermining user trust even when average performance is good.

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.