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The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. That can be life or death. In fact, "Apple isn't ready to engineer phones

The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. That can be life or death. In fact, "Apple isn't ready to engineer phones at a life-or-death standard" was a fairly common critique of the iPhone in the early days. In response, Apple ran a little PR campaign around their radio engineering efforts--they had a web page that showed all the cool-looking rooms for testing radios, which they invited a couple reporters to tour, etc.

nomel 8y ago
> The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. An iPhone handling an emergency call is an exceptional use case. A car driving is not an exceptional use case for a car. A life and death scenario is occurs every few minutes, or continuously for something like a mountain road, if something like brakes, limited throttle, or steering were to fail. But, I would, naively, assume that the operation of these critical components were in no way related to timing requirements of some process in Linux.
- rconti 8y ago
  Is a Tesla steer-by-wire? No. It seems you have to prove that failure of these hack-y systems would lead to the disastrous result you postulate.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Brakes aren’t either. You might lose ABS or boost, but you’ll still have brakes.
nathancahill 8y ago
That PR tour was in response to "AntennaGate" when Apple failed to engineer a phone to a life-or-death standard (well, if you were "holding it wrong").
mcguire 8y ago
Didn't the iPhone use a dual processor set up like the other manufacturers at the time? One ui/app processor and a separate radio processor stack?
- monocasa 8y ago
  There's a lot of EE black magic around antenna design.
- rurban 8y ago
  Evert smartphone separates the baseband processor from the frontend android/ios/... Arm processor. Even PC's have now a hidden baseband processor for the mission critical stuff, like backdoors and surveillance.

nomel 8y ago

> The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. An iPhone handling an emergency call is an exceptional use case. A car driving is not an exceptional use case for a car. A life and death scenario is occurs every few minutes, or continuously for something like a mountain road, if something like brakes, limited throttle, or steering were to fail. But, I would, naively, assume that the operation of these critical components were in no way related to timing requirements of some process in Linux.

rconti 8y ago
Is a Tesla steer-by-wire? No. It seems you have to prove that failure of these hack-y systems would lead to the disastrous result you postulate.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Brakes aren’t either. You might lose ABS or boost, but you’ll still have brakes.

nathancahill 8y ago

That PR tour was in response to "AntennaGate" when Apple failed to engineer a phone to a life-or-death standard (well, if you were "holding it wrong").

mcguire 8y ago

Didn't the iPhone use a dual processor set up like the other manufacturers at the time? One ui/app processor and a separate radio processor stack?

monocasa 8y ago
There's a lot of EE black magic around antenna design.
rurban 8y ago
Evert smartphone separates the baseband processor from the frontend android/ios/... Arm processor. Even PC's have now a hidden baseband processor for the mission critical stuff, like backdoors and surveillance.