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What is the new Apple U1 chip?
- jws 7y agoDon’t let the “quora.com” make you skip this one. It’s a detailed and informative discussion of the U1 and UWB as understood today. I was pleasantly surprised.
- endorphone 7y agoIt started off sort of interesting (aside from the "people who didn't believe me are redundant bit"), but goes completely kooky by the second half, drawing absolutely absurd conclusions. Or maybe I'm just redundant.
- chadlavi 7y agoI didn't let that dissuade me, but I felt a little unsure about what I'd just read when I scrolled to the bottom and saw the person who wrote it describes themselves as an "alchemist and metaphysician".
- iamnotacrook 7y agoIt was Quora - are you sure they didn't put "expert"?
- kelp 7y agoBack in the 2011-2012 era of Square, Brian would often opine at length about our products, our strategy, etc. He'd write as if he had some sort of inside information and was a serious authority on the subject. Anytime he'd make a new post about us, it would make the rounds on internal lists. Usually to the tune of "Oh wow, another Roemmele..." and we'd all read on in amazement at how much he'd just plain made up. As insiders, we knew his posts were pure speculation, and were rarely even close to the mark about strategy or the technical details of our products. Since then I cringe a little anytime I see one of this posts show up up. He completely lacked credibility when talking about Square. So I'm not sure why it would be different with Apple.
- zht 7y agowhat is kelp? (just saying hello)
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- oh_sigh 7y agoThere's a human hack where once you predict/guess/use insider info to get one thing right before hand, you will get some percentage of people who blindly follow you and can explain away any and every incorrect future prediction. I've seen it happen from QAnon all the way to "insiders" "leaking" information on what would happen each week on Survivor.
- perl4ever 7y agoThere's a very old con where you simply send every possible prediction to a different person, and progressively eliminate all the ones that got wrong info, until you have one left who has observed you make a series of impossible predictions.
- dkersten 7y agoThere's a "card trick" magicians often like to do which is to simply ask the spectator to name a card at random. If they, by pure chance, happen to name the card that the performer already knows is on top of their deck of cards (eg because they peeked at it), then they reveal the card and it looks like they performed an impossible trick. If they named any other card, then the performer simply does another trick (perhaps looping back to the named card later or perhaps simply ignoring it or making a joke). Its a good opener: if it works, it grabs everyone's attention for the remainder of the act and if it fails, nobody will even notice as they get distracted by the actual routines. Every so often, pure random chance means that they get it right and it looks incredible to the spectators who witness it.
- dwighttk 7y agoThe funny thing is almost everyone I've walked through using find my iPhone over the past few years assumed Apple already had this capability and ended up disappointed if they were looking for a device that was not sitting out in plain sight.
- sosodev 7y agoHuh, that's something actually interesting about the new phones. I wonder why it wasn't talked about at all on stage?
- mrkstu 7y agoProbably because the Apple products to make use of it aren’t ready yet. There are references in OS betas to assisted reality head-sets and a Tile competitor, which will both likely access this chip- but since they aren’t ready yet the demos for them were spiked and other references to the underlying tech scrubbed.
- penagwin 7y agoI'm guessing they won't release them until they have a new iPhone to try to sell. It wouldn't really work if the new products only work with a product they released 6 months ago - there's little incentive not to just wait for the new phone anyway (Unless they expect everyone to be upgrading?).
- dwighttk 7y ago> they won't release them until they have a new iPhone to try to sell. like the one announced in the referenced iPhone announcement event?
- penagwin 7y agoNo, because by the time they release anything the iPhone that was just released will be at least half a year old. This might be a feature worth upgrading over, but who wants to upgrade in the middle of a cycle? The only people who would benefit are those who already have this new iPhone anyway.
- glenneroo 7y agoThe author asked the same question: > Why Apple Did Not Announce The U1 Chip? So with all of these amazing attributes, why did Apple not announce the Apple A1 Chip? I assert it is a confluence of things: The iPhoneOS software needed is not yet released Apple will release AppleLocate tags for holiday shopping 2019 Apple had too many things to announce at this Apple Event and this would take too much time Apple is aware of the privacy implication many will cast and wants to spend more time to explain Other issues I can not present at this moment in time
- PascLeRasc 7y agoExcellent writeup. The post mostly talks about navigation in indoor spaces and U1-to-U1 communication, but I hope it fixes Google/Apple Maps not knowing which direction I'm pointing my phone and constantly re-updating.
- m0zg 7y agoApple Maps already have a mode which knows where you're pointing your phone (based on built-in compass). As far as I can tell, Google does not, and it figures it out when you move.
- dlivingston 7y agoWhether a maps app has compass capability enabled depends on the parent hardware: in particular, if the hardware contains a magnetometer. On my iPhone X, Google Maps clearly shows the compass direction with a blue cone emitting from my location 'circle'.
- m0zg 7y agoAll iPhones since iPhone 3G (IIRC) have a magnetometer.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoOn Android, Google Maps can orient itself using the camera. https://mashable.com/article/google-maps-augmented-reality-walking-directions/ https://mashable.com/article/google-maps-augmented-reality-w...
- spike021 7y agoThat's odd; when I visited Japan this past spring I used Google Maps on my iPhone practically everywhere while walking, and the biggest helpful UI element was the blue compass arrow that would point wherever I was facing. It was generally quite accurate as I can't even remember it ever really pointing a different direction from where I was actually pointing.
- ryeights 7y ago>The new Apple‑designed U1 chip uses Ultra Wideband technology for spatial awareness — allowing iPhone 11 to precisely locate other U1‑equipped Apple devices. Think GPS at the scale of your living room. [...] Think massive geopositioning satellites orbiting my living room and communicating with my iPhone? Neat!
- Avamander 7y agoI don't know why people are downvoting you, there's surely a privacy implication with such tech. I'm surprised there aren't SDR-based occupancy detectors sold to thieves, that say if people are home or not based on BT/WiFi and in future U1 UWB.
- CaliforniaKarl 7y agoI hope this will become phenominally cheap, as I would love to see this thing used more in stores. Here's a pie-in-the-sky example: I almost always buy clothes in-person. I want to see what I'm getting, and want to avoid the issues (discussed in other, mostly Amazon-related, posts) that come from buying stuff online. But I often run into trouble finding the specific item (make, style, and size) on the shelf. If each item were tagged (possibly as part of the anti-theft tag), I could be led directly to where the item is. Here's a more realistic example: I want to buy an DB9 null-modem adapter from Micro Center. I can find out in general where it is. But if a tag were attached to the shelf, I could be led directly to where the item should be. Of course, there are tons of issues (among which cost is but one). But it's nice to know that things like this may be possible!
- jbigelow76 7y agoIt may well become phenominally cheap... for Apple. Margins, baby, margins!
- spike021 7y ago>Here's a pie-in-the-sky example: I almost always buy clothes in-person. I want to see what I'm getting, and want to avoid the issues (discussed in other, mostly Amazon-related, posts) that come from buying stuff online. But I often run into trouble finding the specific item (make, style, and size) on the shelf. If each item were tagged (possibly as part of the anti-theft tag), I could be led directly to where the item is. Cool idea but tricky execution. There'd need to be a way to "claim" that you already picked it up (maybe NFC from phone to specific item you pick up?) otherwise you get people chasing each other throughout the store. I'd figure it'd work better just to embed one in the price tag for the item on the shelf or rack it's located on; at that point it's a matter of the store being kept as organized as possible so stuff doesn't get mixed into other areas.
- Someone 7y agoJust an observation: half a century ago or so, things like that were possible; those shops would have employed people who could lead you to where the item was. Said person would even have directed you to a competitor’s shop if they didn’t sell the article you’re looking for, and might even have done that if they did sell it, but didn’t have it in stock.
- salimmadjd 7y agoMKBHD at 5:32 talks about this after the event [1]. He talks about directional airdrop sharing features that the U1 allows. [1] https://youtu.be/UVpJouUyLBM?t=332 https://youtu.be/UVpJouUyLBM?t=332
- willis936 7y agoRead in the voice of Michael Bolton from Office Space: So it’s like Batman Begins?
- baybal2 7y agoThere is one major big patent troll entity that goes around and sues anything UWB. It was the reason why UWB PHY was dropped from bluetooth
- JonathanFly 7y ago>It is entirely possible to build a useful AR/MR/VR map of any indoor space using the Apple U1 chip in just a few minutes few minutes. I'd love to see the fidelity of this. It seems unbelievable...
- yeldarb 7y agoThrow one of these into the Apple Watch (or a gamepad) and you have something that works like the Oculus Touch Controller. Put one in your AirPods and you have head tracking. Could be a powerful addition to their future AR hardware.
- tln 7y agoMy wife is constantly hunting for one of her Airpods. Just having accurate location tracking system for them would be amazing.
- gnicholas 7y agoThe biggest problem is finding Airpods that are in the case. In the case, they can't connect to a nearby phone. Out of the case, you can get in range, connect, then play a sound. I have lost my Airpods in the case a few times, and never lost a single Airpod out of the case. I hope this solves the lost-in-the-case problem.
- kabacha 7y agoIt says it's 50x faster than GPS when it comes to latency but that still is too slow to be used as any sort of controller.
- JavierRoV 7y agoThat's Apple's Tile, actually. Having something like this on a Phone may and will bring up cool ideas. I see the random games easily but just give it some time for it to be the foundation for a location intelligence startup.
- chiph 7y agoHow well does UWB penetrate a typical office wall? At a previous job we looked into locating. If you had two items parked on opposite sides of a common wall, you couldn't tell which rooms they were in. Which was critical for us since we did NOT want people wasting time running into the wrong room to grab it (think automated defibrillators)
- barbegal 7y agoIt is tuneable and at low bandwidth it can have a range of several hundred metres, maybe 100m indoors. The location element uses time of flight which is less effected by walls than signal strength methods so should be accurate to within a meter even across a large building.
- chiph 7y agoThat was roughly the accuracy of the WiFi triangulation systems we looked at. And it wasn't accurate enough. The typical US office wall with metal framing studs is not quite 5" (127mm) thick, which would have been our worst-case (with the equipment touching the walls on both sides).
- Rebelgecko 7y agoWhen I played around with the Decawave chips mentioned in the article, not well. When going through walls there'd be some weird attenuation and maybe some multipath stuff that gave unusual results. Going through a wall could throw the results off by 10cm which I suppose would prevent you from knowing which side of the wall something is on.
- wbl 7y agoIf it didn't penetrate you would have been better off!
- mrlambchop 7y agoI'm looking forward to the tags. I hope they make something super small that can be snapped into a range of accessories such as dog collars or suitcase name tags (some first party, no doubt a ton third party to follow including some wonderful and crazy things like a message in a bottle). Once other peoples phones can find my things reliably, a lot of anxiety I have about things I tend to loose will go away (for a small price). (I used to love Tile, but as a product we hit its technological peak several years ago and the network effect does not seem to improving this incrementally as much as it used to)
- vaxman 7y agoI don't get the dog collar application, unless the dog is always indoors or somehow needs to trigger proximity based automations (feed me, go outside where I can't be tracked without equipping the fenced-in yard with anchor nodes, etc.)
- phogster 7y agoWonder if they will run into trademark issues when they move on to the next version of the chip.
- BrentOzar 7y ago> Wonder if they will run into trademark issues when they move on to the next version of the chip No, but they'll give everyone a free one, and then the blowback will be terrible.
- tus88 7y agoI doubt Lockheed cares much about an obsolete spy plane that was secret for most of it's existence.
- vaxman 7y agoBono won't care as long as they don't pitch him to invest in it (like webOS)...also it has to play "All That You Can't Leave Behind" whenever you activate tracking mode.
- tlb 7y agoMy main use case for finding things only needs it to show what building and room it’s in. Did I leave it at the office, or in my car? If it’s in my office, it can only be in a few places. How common are the use cases where you need to know it’s 56 feet ahead?
- macintux 7y agoSome of us are a little less organized than others. Knowing which room my keys are in is remarkably unhelpful.
- tlb 7y agoPerhaps I think I mainly need coarse location because I only ever invoke "find my computer" after looking for quite a while. If I used it every time I needed to grab my laptop, I might care more about precise location.
- tlrobinson 7y agoI spent a solid half hour looking for my wallet other day. It was on a window sill hidden by the blinds which had been lowered.
- adwi 7y agoPerhaps a future iteration of the Apple credit card will feature a U(x) chip, automatically embedding a beacon in your wallet.
- ricardobeat 7y agoThis article is interesting and informative, but feels oddly synthetic. It follows the classic Quora spill-the-beans-and-predict-the-future format but has some interesting quirks. The "How does UWB Work?" section has paragraphs lifted straight from the patent applications. Some sentences make no sense, ex: "the U1 chip along with the results of FaceID/TouchID system is stored in the Secure Enclave"; the typo at the end calling it 'A1 chip' before going into 'holographic crystal memory', plus the final sentence: "We will once again leave the Mainframe computer and become cloudless". I'd guess it is an elaborate promotion piece for the author and his companies. Nothing is free on the internet anymore.
- tlb 7y agoEvery article is a promotion for the author and company it’s written by. No need to point this out on every article.
- kortilla 7y agoNo, there is a difference between people that genuinely want to provide good information, expand knowledge, etc and people that are just using hype buzzwords to generate sales leads.
- rolltiide 7y agoThen point that out instead, exclusively
- stevenhuang 7y agoI believe that was the intent with "promotional piece".
- bduerst 7y agoPromoted Content is an industry term, not just a phrase. Publishers will subsidize themselves by accepting money from companies to write promotional articles, even without disclosing it. There's a difference between that and an author just writing an article because it's their day job.
- barbegal 7y agoLocation via time of flight is very accurate in terms of distance but not angle. It will require at least two septated devices to accurately pinpoint a third unknown device. And if those two baseline devices are moving then the accuracy is reduced. Android has support for location via wifi time of flight (802.11mc) where the baseline devices are your existing wifi access points. It makes much more sense indoors however it has two disadvantages: it won't work outside wifi range and it is much more difficult to make low power wifi devices.
- seedless-sensat 7y ago> It will require at least two septated devices to accurately pinpoint a third unknown device. Not true with beamforming. Imagine the chip as a little rotating radar dish.
- HALtheWise 7y agoI wonder whether you can fix this by using the positional tracking they developed for Augmented Reality (ARkit). If your device is moving, even a little, and the thing you are looking for is stationary, it should be possible to figure out exactly where it is.
- mrfusion 7y agoI wonder when they’ll get around to fixing airdrop? Nearby People just don’t show up most of the time.
- gumby 7y agoLikely related to your or their privacy settings. It was flakey when it first came out, mainly due to hardware compatibility, but it’s pretty robust these days IMHO
- monk_e_boy 7y agoI see how it measures distance and direction, but how does it estimate height? Are there multiple antennas in the phone?
- bborud 7y agoWe tried the DW chip last year. It works astonishingly well.
- XnoiVeX 7y agoWhat was your application if you can tell us?
- bborud 7y agoIndoor positioning. Just a prototype. We wrote a blog posting about it : https://blog.exploratory.engineering/post/decawave/ https://blog.exploratory.engineering/post/decawave/ The way we used it is a bit power hungry and doesn't scale well, but we worked out a design that would have.
- m3kw9 7y agoAll the AR capabilities in the iPhone is just a test bed for the eventual AR wearable. AR on the phone is just a clunky way to use AR, by holding it up to your face with a camera running. The U1 chip brings AR closer to how it should “just work”
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- zaroth 7y agoSo I assume they can superimpose a blue dot on an AR camera view to show me where in the room the kids left the Apple TV remote (again). I was telling my kids about this at the dinner table tonight and we were cracking up imagining our dog eating one of these trackers, and you open up the app and the blue dot is following the dog around. Why Milo, why?!
- greglindahl 7y agoInside of a dog, there's stuff that absorbs radio waves. It's not a good UWB environment.
- w-ll 7y agoUWB?
- jachee 7y agoUltra Wideband. Did you read the article?
- greglindahl 7y agoAlso missed the Groucho Marx reference, "Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." Which is definitely true when you're depending on UWB to provide "light".
- vaxman 7y agoor Conan's AirPods commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_wImaGRkNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_wImaGRkNY remember that "Quora" predicted Apple would be putting U1s in AirPods too
- anoncareer0212 7y agoI read it, twice, and the distance between "UWB environment" and "dog stomach" was enough that my pitiful excuse for a brain didn't recognize it after 30 seconds, and required reading this comment to realize what it meant. HN tends to assume a ton of charity in the comments section, "did you read..." style comments are highly discouraged
- sabujp 7y agotime to figure out how to jam these signals. I don't want my 3d location tracked by every guided missile out there
- cmpb 7y agoI’m trying to imagine a world where this technology is ubiquitous, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’ll be easily exploitable from the perspective of a nefarious actor (e.g. a jamming device of some sort). I just can’t see safety-critical systems coming to rely on it
- m463 7y agoor used by apps to track more people and things you thought were untrackable, all silently allowed by apple APIs, like iBeacons, Deep Links and more. sigh.
- nyxxie 7y ago> The new Apple‑designed U1 chip uses Ultra Wideband technology for spatial awareness — allowing iPhone 11 to precisely locate other U1‑equipped Apple devices Interesting. Will this thing be always on and broadcasting my phone's precise location? Seems like a rather privacy-sensitive feature.
- macintux 7y agoApple has talked quite a bit about privacy when tracking devices, in preparation for iOS 13. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluetooth/ https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet...
- qwerqwer 7y agoThe Biggest Apple Announcement Today Was What Apple Actually Didn’t Announce—Yet. HaHA!
- stevetodd 7y agoI've always dreamed of a magic wand device that I could point at things and give commands. For example, point it at the window and say "close blinds". You could even add gestures to do it silently. With this UWB tech, accelerometers, a mic, and voice recognition, it seems like a viable product. Of course, I think Apple intends the phone to be the magic wand.
- luxuryballs 7y agoDang combine 5G with this and the all seeing eye can follow you around a room with some serious precision.
- Prity 7y agoDang combine 5G with this and the all seeing eye can follow To know what is Apple U1 Chip visit www.chillyblog.com
- Prity 7y agoDang combine 5G with this and the all seeing eye can follow. To know more about Apple U1 chip visit www.chillyblog.com
- svendbt 7y agoUWB is being touted as the best solution for next generation car keys, as all wireless solutions for car keys to date are susceptible to relay attacks (exception being car is online and controlled by an app). With an UWV chip in there, Apple could store your car key credentials and use their phones as a secure key.
- RickSanchez2600 7y agoI misread it as UI chip, as in it handles the User Interface and frees up the CPU for other things. But it is the U1 chip instead.
- jwr 7y agoThe elephant in the room is that UWB positioning is indeed very precise, but only if you have a number of well-positioned beacons with known precise locations working together. The article is all giggly about the rosy future, but having worked with UWB (specifically, the Decawave chips mentioned in the article) I would be much more restrained with predictions. Yes, this is really good technology, but nowhere nearly as easy to use as it seems. I'd be very interested in technical details: are they using 802.15.4a? Do they use the spectrum above 6GHz?
- lowtolerance 7y agoI know very little about any of this stuff, but it occurred to me that Apple already has a few technologies in play by which devices can sense the layout of their surroundings: HomePod can determine its proximity to walls by listening to how sound reverberates in a space, and iPhones map depth by comparing data between by dual cameras as well as by dot projection. Could these technologies potentially be used to eliminate or reduce the need for multiple UWB devices?
- michaelt 7y agoIs it any good for the where-is-the-dog use case in the article, where you might want to find something at opposite side of the house, presumably without a network of beacons to help?
- nsnick 7y agoYou don't need to know the positions of the beacons unless you want an instant location fix. You can use SLAM with inertial odometry or visual inertial odometry to find a precise position using UWB beacons at unknown positions. SLAM algorithms will also give you the positions of the beacons. The catches are that it requires compute, and it requires you to move around for the model to converge.
- billconan 7y agocan the signal penetrate objects? for example, when a receiver is hidden underneath cloths or sealed in a bag?
- anonu 7y agoThis just reconfirms my view that nobody can really touch Apple when it comes to tight software and hardware integration. On the hardware front, very few companies have the capability to design and manufacture their own chips. Apple does it repeatedly. The article also points to the very long timeline they can adopt in development. Some of these concepts have been in play since the early 2000s.
- cheeko1234 7y agoI copied this amazing comment from a HN user a few days ago. I'll shamelessly paste it here since it's relevant to your comment: Lots of people disappointed in the new iPhone. The reason I see is simple; Apple has long been outsourced a large fraction of its hardware innovation capabilities to other companies rather than having a full vertical ownership of the production line, unlike its competitors (Samsung, Huawei, etc). This works very well when most of the required technologies are already there for bringing their idea to the reality so Apple doesn't have to push the state of the art for the manufacturing technologies. Multi-touch, Retina Display, Apple designed SoC were all good examples where this strategy worked out very well. The trouble is that now most of the low hanging fruits are gone and the rest of innovation opportunities lie within the manufacturer side and require non-trivial investments. For instance, getting rid of notch requires camera under screen technology. This is being developed by Samsung, their competitor. The same thing applies to fingerprint sensor under screen. While all the competitors are shipping 5G in their flagships, iPhone 11 couldn't ship 5G due to their hard dependency on Qualcomm. In short, the current landscape doesn't allow Apple to keep itself on the bleeding edge in the smartphone business. I'm curious about how Apple will address this problem. Disappointingly, I haven't seen any positive signal to indicate that Apple has a good plan to address this issue. It first tried a high-price, even-more-premium strategy and this turned out to be a disastrous one. Apple now tries to expand into the services business and chooses to be a competitor to its own ecosystem by exercising its dominant position. I'm pretty sure that this plan will work very well, maybe too well sufficient to de-prioritize the iPhone business just enough to keep its marketshare around 3~40% and make no more commitments. I hope I'm wrong.
- gnrlst 7y agoWhile some of the things the author says on quora may make sense, he is a charlatan. His name is Brian Rommele and he used to have 300K+ Twitter followers. When Twitter cracked down on fake followers last year (or the year before) his count dropped to 70k. His tweets like crazy and constantly retweets his own tweets and retweets those again. He gets 6-10 likes per tweet which is very strange considering the follower count he has. He's constantly saying he invented incredible technology but never shows it (or shows something that could be easily and likely simulated). I wouldn't trust him to pick up a subway sandwich for me. Sorry for the rant, but I think the internet is giving these types of people louder voices than they deserve.
- sjroot 7y agoFor more information about the author, their personal site: http://voicefirst.expert/ http://voicefirst.expert/
- rmilejczz 7y agoLetsEncrypt is so simple in 2019 it really makes me cringe to see sites served over HTTP, especially when the site belongs to some self proclaimed “visionary”
- vaxman 7y agoI wouldn't go so far as to condemn him simply for trying to get his message out with Twitter trickery. Twitter itself is a giant freak show with "soft bans" etc. and would have already gone the way of My_ if it hadn't been for a certain politician using it to bypass the talking heads on TV.
- rmilejczz 7y agoThis is one of my major gripes with quora, I feel like it attracts and rewards these types of folks who are then immediately trusted thanks to their very high “internet point” scores
- Cyberdog 7y ago
- somehnguy 7y agoMore likely: “Hey Siri, we lost Spot the dog, do you know where he is?” Siri: "I found this on the web for 'we lost Spot the dog, do you know where he is'" displays google results Seriously Apple, Siri is awful in its current form.
- giarc 7y agoI once asked it to convert a currency amount ("Hey Siri, how much is $458 US in Canadian Dollars?") and it just gave me the wiki for the US dollar. You'd think currency exchange would have been one of the cases they would have tested.
- Smoozy23 7y agoThis chip adds support for UWB to iPhones. Apple's new U1 chip uses UWB technology for spatial orientation, allowing the iPhone 11 to pinpoint the location of other Apple devices equipped with U1. Imagine GPS on the scale of your living room. Therefore, if you want to share a file with AirDrop with someone, just point your iPhone to this device and it will be the first in the list.
- timpannn 7y agoBought from Samsung ;)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- r3trohack3r 7y agoFor those interested in using one of the DW1000 chips in their own projects, there is a hackaday project[0] for an Arduino compatible indoor navigation system. [0] https://hackaday.io/project/7183/ https://hackaday.io/project/7183/
- edmoffo 7y agoThis article deserves a better place than a Quora answer :) Why not a blog post of a proper article in MIT or somewhere similar?
- jon889 7y agoHow come we’re only starting to hear about UWB now? Has some development made it more feasible? As in why haven’t companies used it in previous products where location tracking has been an issue