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Comment by bonniemuffin | Hacker News Reader

Tip: the fall detection feature seems to be turned off by default. I just turned mine on. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208944

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I think its turned off by default if you are under a certain age - 60?

> If you've entered your age when you set up your Apple Watch or in the Health app and you're age 65 and over, this feature automatically turns on.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208944

This is so amazing. Serious kudos to the apple watch team for this.

Apple don't get nearly enough credit for the thought and effort they put into these sorts of features. The same goes to their dedication to accessibility, which is industry-leading and honestly pretty inspiring.

Doesn't seem like outsized thought and effort given the companies size, resources, and relatively small product focus..

No, but they are one of the few _actually_ thinking about it rather than devoting their resources to something "more worthy".

It's easy to criticize a company their size, but they definitely do this very very right.

Apple has had strong accessibility features since before they were a household name, when they were a fraction of the size of the company they are today.

Here's a post from 2006 for example, talking about accessibility in Mac OS 9: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/724948.

Here's about accessibility in Mac OS X Tiger (2005): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger#Accessibility.

It's 2019, not 1980.

Evidence is simply being brought forth to showcase that before Apple became as large as they did, they still cared about accessiblity, irregardless of their "company size" as you stated.

I don't see how that's relevant at all in 2019. People WERE giving Apple mad props for their thoughtfulness back in the day. Now, they have revenue over a third that of Saudi Arabia's GDP. I was responding the OPs point. That's evidence for an argument nobody made.

> Doesn't seem like outsized thought and effort given the companies size, resources, and relatively small product focus..

It was evidence to elucidate upon a baseless statement you made earlier.

Ironically, I think the accessibility focus started because they were a fraction of today’s size: in the early 2000s, section 508 requirements were becoming more stringent; there was an increasing risk that Apple would get shut out of government contracts, and due to the small market share of OS X, it was not considered a viable market for commercial screen reader vendors, so Apple decided to roll their own.

Thanks to strong leadership in the accessibility team, there was an increasing buy-in from the top, and throughout the company. Today, accessibility is indeed in Apple’s DNA, but initially, there was quite a bit of genetic engineering and (dare I say it?) government regulation involved.

Apple was known for easy to use in the 1980s. While that isn't entirely accessibility, the two are related. The early macs had some accessibility features.

I ordered my grandmother a Series 5 for this feature alone, in fact it just arrived at my door today and she’s coming over later this week so I can get it setup and walk her through the basics.

She has a hard time getting up from the floor if she kneels or sits down as is, one good fall from a cat tripping her or something is likely to be devastating.

Just curious did she already have an iPhone? I want to buy one for my mother but she doesn’t use iPhone. First I would have to buy her an iPhone.

We just switched her to an iPhone 8 recently because her Lumia 950 wouldn’t hold a charge and W10M is going EOL soon anyway.

If you're interested, it might just be worth buying a second hand or refurbed SE.

The only iPhone I've owned is asecond hand iPhone 5C that I used for a few months. The watch is making me think my next phone will be an iPhone. Fortunately, I don't think there are any Android only apps that I depend on so the switch should be easy.

Does anyone know if you need to get the watch with an active cellular plan to have the auto-911 feature? Or is it like how cell phones without a plan can still call 911?

Also of note: Fall detection is exclusive to the series 4 or above, which seems questionable.

(I would be very surprised if the series 3 and 4 have significantly different accelerometer hardware)

Why would a different accelerometer surprise you? The entire SiP is different between the Series 3 and Series 4. One source say the accelerometer in S4 has higher dynamic range. [0]

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13364/apple-announces-the-app...

Series 4 is very different hardware. I'm not surprised.

They specifically said in the announcement that it was due to new tech.

> which seems questionable

Maybe because they added new hardware to enable it...?

Consider that to detect falls reliably, you might need an accelerometer with a higher range than that was in the original watch.

Might also have needed a higher sample rate.

For battery life concerns, I can see them implementing some of the fall detection logic in hardware as well. For example, a high shock or shaking could trigger the fall-detection software to wake. Although, with the 60-second period, they probably wake the main processor often enough anyway that hardware detection might not save much power.

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