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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, for anyone who watches Apple close enough, this isn't news.

Its clear Apple are heading down the disruptive disintermediation route.

Look at the Air Tag. Effectively killing off competitors by making use of the global network of Apple devices.

Look at their recent BNPL (buy now, pay later) announcement for example. Managing the whole caboodle, including the finance itself, entirely internally.

Or look at the fact they still haven't rolled out Apple card internationally. My uninformed guess is that it is more to do with "something's brewing" rather than the US cards not working.

Their recent satphone announcement. Clearly that's just the start. I think most people are guessing the endgame will be carrier disintermediation. And frankly, given how shit most cell carriers are, I can't wait for Apple to come along and give the incumbents a run for their money.

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Their new weather forecasting service is also intriguing. They will soon have millions of thermometer-equipped Apple Watches in the world (IIRC the Series 8 and AWU will have these), allowing them to create an incredibly detailed mapping of temperatures around the world (or at least places where people can afford expensive watches...).

Aren’t those thermometers pointing the wrong way (towards the wrist)?

No, they have two thermometers, one for ambient temperature and one for body temp.

The new Apple Watches will actually have two thermometers, one facing inward and one facing outwards.

There are two, one inward and one outward facing. This was highlighted when talking about taking water temp readings when swimming or diving.

I would bet that the internal sensor is used in a model with the skin sensor to remove the effects of the internal temperature of the watch and get a more accurate skin temp reading.

Wouldn't they only be able to make a detailed mapping of the temperatures of people's wrists?

> Wouldn't they only be able to make a detailed mapping of the temperatures of people's wrists?

Unless you're sick, most people's body temperature is within a fairly tight range.

So they could compensate for that ...

Is there any correlation between your body temperature and the outdoor temperature?

Depends on if you're a lizard or a bird :)

It would be hilarious: the temperature worldwide is roughly 98.6° F, except in NYC where the marathon is being run and it is somewhat warmer. /s

> except in NYC

Or, ahem.... "cold winter evenings". ;-)

The barometers combined with GPS and temp is an incredibly powerful sensor network.

Its a shame that it is locked up inside of apple.

It's not that much better than the normal network of AMS sensors. For one, it doesn't give you wind speeds at various levels (critical for predicting weather).

Second, it doesn't give you any additional readings over oceans, which is where the data is lacking in the current network of data.

It does give you more robust surface temperature readings in cloudy areas but that doesn't really help you predict the weather significantly better.

Source: degree in atmospheric sciences

Yeah, but maybe Apple will take all of this private data, and then build their own GCM, and solve data assimilation for their new model … yeah right.

Let’s pretend that data from user portable devices isn’t garbage (it is): then what do you even do with it? In cities you’ll have thousands of readings per voxel none of which are more valuable. Then you have to clean your data, excluding data from inside or vehicles or hot pavement or heated patios and so on. Apple won’t go to the expense of running their own GCM, and I doubt even mesoscale models. All I could see is some sort of correlative AI, doing microscale adjustments to government sponsored models. So all of this work, and maybe you get one degree better at forecasts and a bit of nowcasting. And because it isn’t physics-based, you might occasionally get something very wrong happening.

The oceans are a data hole (technical term, really) as you mentioned, but the real missing data is above the surface. It’s too bad about Project Loon, because that would have been much more helpful to forecasting than a million monkeys wearing watches.

I glide quite a bit, so I'm VERY interested in low level micro climate.

Is there a really no use in having higher resolution for modeling the boundary layer?

It seems like having a mountain covered in tiny barometric and temp sensors could at least validate a lot of what we think we know about the boundary layer.

I personally would love to be able to see what the temperature at the bottom and top of a given topographic feature is, as well as how atmospheric pressure is deviating from pure altitude differences.

I build instruments for gliders so I know that the sensors in our phones are capable of incredibly fine resolution. Is there really no use for billions of high resolution data points in climate science?

I'm not sure what happened but Dark Sky went from awesome to awful in recent months after the Apple acquisition. Is it just me? Going from "no rain all day" to actively raining with a huge storm 2 hours later. The app does update with this info, but very close to the actual storm.

I too have noticed this. I believe the Dark Sky website and app will continue to become less accurate... I think the explanation is (somebody who knows more please correct me): Dark Sky's technology was acquired by Apple and integrated into the Apple Weather built-in app... and the decision was made that any improvements/updates/maintenance on the Dark Sky service itself are accessible exclusively through that Apple Weather app now. As a user of the Dark Sky website, I feel sad.

Well, there is a red banner on the site saying

> Support for the Dark Sky iOS app will end on December 31st, 2022, and support for the Dark Sky API will end on March 31st, 2023.

So basically them buying then closing the service to make their own seem better

They made their own actually better if that matters to you. The iOS weather app now has many of DarkSky's features.

This has been happening across nearly every weather source I've been using. My hypothesis is either:

* Climate change is causing problems with forecasting models

* Forecasting models changed, which has introduce unexpected edge cases

The former is going to be literally true on the grounds that climate change is increasing chaos in the system, hence unpredictability increases strikingly.

I'm not sure this happens on the time scale of 'app got acquired', though. It's absolutely going to increase year by year, and if you'd got used to how it was three years ago and didn't notice some of the outlier events, you might be shocked at the new normal.

Climate change absolutely will cause problems with any conceivable forecasting model because you can't encapsulate chaos, only map its expected potential outcomes: and the nasty truth is that energy is fed into the system, those potential outcomes blow up exponentially. Not even slightly linear. So that's what we're seeing.

I've noticed that the "rain starting in your area" alerts are close to correct - and spot-on for the local airport.

So I'd not be surprised if they somehow switched their data source to be not as granular as it once was.

This study claims that there was a decrease in weather prediction accuracy caused by the reduction in commercial flights due to Covid. Maybe there are still some lingering effects from that?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200717101026.h...

Wow! This is extremely interesting!

While this is confirmation bias, this reflects almost identically with the timeframe in which the forecasts became significantly worse in my area.

Could 5G have something to do with this? https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-trouble-with-5...

As an Android user, it used to be a fun party trick at the bar, to show everyone the alert on my phone from dark sky that it was going to start raining in X minutes or that it was going to stop raining in Y minutes and then everyone checking later and it being basically down to the second accurate.

As a former paid user of Dark Sky that lost that information when Apple bought them I feel no sympathy for iOS users that Dark Sky has gone to crap

I am sad such an amazing tool for the world was destroyed by a corporation trying to deprive another corporation so they could maybe make a little more money.

The integration of dark sky was definitely rocky but apple is running dark sky as a data api now, this android app is apparently using it as it’s weather data source now:

https://www.boondogglelabs.com/projects/forecaster.html

The Dark Sky API is getting shut down in a few months: https://blog.darksky.net/

> Going from "no rain all day" to actively raining with a huge storm 2 hours later.

Honestly, that's about right here in Florida. :)

It's not just you, but this started well before the Apple acquisition. I "sold" many copies of the Dark Sky app to family and friends just by showing its magic but that magic died awhile ago. I don't think it's been very accurate for 3-4 years now.

Not so sure about this. There's going to be a ton of noise in this data from an outsider POV. At an absolute minimum, for this to be usable as weather data they will have to determine when it's measuring the actual outside weather, as opposed to the indoor, or in-car/-bus/-train temperature.

Good point! During times when AC or heat is running a lot, there might be a bimodal distribution of reported temperatures. I wonder if they could use the ambient light sensor to determine if the person is inside or outside, or if they could use location data to figure out that 'this Apple Watch is in the middle of a large field, so he must be outside'. Then they could just ignore other data in that microclimate area, and create a weather mapping based on watches located in known open areas.

> I wonder if they could use the ambient light sensor to determine if the person is inside or outside

Maybe they are they next to a window or under a sky light.

> or if they could use location data to figure out that 'this Apple Watch is in the middle of a large field, so he must be outside'.

Could be in a tent or other temporary structure.

Yep, there will always be exceptions. But taking the median of a decently-filtered set could work. And Apple obviously has a team of folks working on this to come up with something smarter than some random HNer (me) who's just shooting from the hip).

> And Apple obviously has a team of folks working on this to come up with something smarter than some random HNer (me) who's just shooting from the hip).

Don't talk like that, its a self defeating mindset. You are likely as competent as most Apple engineers (the 10x benefit from less inhibitions and tons of energy.

The people working at apple are like most of us here, curious and driven. Apple has a lot of money to throw at people who bring in experience whereas you and I are individuals who do not work in the field of "figuring out where things are using computers." So we obviously are not experts in the field and not familiar with existing and emerging solutions for the problem.

You said a thousand words worth with "bimodal".

> At an absolute minimum, for this to be usable as weather data they will have to determine when it's measuring the actual outside weather,

Does Apple Watch have a light sensor for an auto dimming display? If so, that can be used as a proxy for indoor/outdoor. It isn't great, shade and such. Throw barometer in there, and you can do a decent job.

Microsoft Band had a UV sensor, so we were able to get pretty accurate detection of indoor/outdoor when combined with all the other sensors, at least during the day. I'm sad UV sensors didn't take off on smart watches in general, it is a super useful sensor to have, but they are rather large and even the lens material to go over them is different than what is otherwise required for a wearable.

I don't see this working effectively. A UV sensor is great during daytime, but what about at night?

Then, you still have to account for the fact that your thermometer is located right next to a variable ~100W heater, vs. normal weather stations that are normally located away from heat sources. Also, the thermometer and heater are occasionally placed inside a tight-fitting insulated container.

Please tell me it is called "Genysis"!

Those watches measure the temperature at the underside of the device, i.e. the temperature of the wearer not the air. And that data they claim stays on your phone, not in their cloud.

why would THEY pay to store YOUR biometric data when YOU could store it for THEM!

They called out in the presentation that it's also got an ambient temperature sensor just underneath the display, to help calibrate body-temp vs room-temp for the overnight "difference from baseline" temperature measurements.

Agreed on the local-storage-for-health-data bit, but I'm sure they could argue that the ambient sensor isn't privacy-relevant.

It’s also very easily anonymizable

They claimed that data is encrypted on device and Apple never sees it.

The temperature inside a winter coat though, not outside in the freezing air right?

there is a lot of money [1] in harvesting location data from weather apps. apple wants that revenue [1]https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/09/30/theres-a-multibilli...

Apple doesn’t need a weather app to obtain location data from users. If they were going to track and sell location data they would just do it invisibly through iOS itself. This (and other tracking opportunities) is the reason Google gives Android away for “free”.

How does the watch differentiate ambient temp from wearer's temp?

Calibration and ML. Like an infrared forehead thermometer.

Maybe, but the watch can be enclosed up a sleeve, in a car, in an office, house, direct sunlight, in the shade... Good if it takes all that into account.

Everything old is new again: PressureNET

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PressureNET

And, well, are ouside at the time. Also need to consider location of the watch, easy to heat it just by sun (in summer) or by wearing long sleeves (when it's colder)

Air pressure on the other hand...

thats not forecasting though is it? its measuring. and only with total coverage its predicting too?

> And frankly, given how shit most cell carriers are, I can't wait for Apple to come along and give the incumbents a run for their money.

Why would the most profitable company in the world want to get into one of the worst businesses in the world?

It's absurdly capital intensive.

Sure, Apple has an abundance of capital, but their shareholders are unlikely to approve this over ever more share buybacks...

Loss leader, maybe. Traditionally not Apple’s style, but if they are indeed changing up their business model, then who knows.

> one of the worst businesses in the world

But is mobile telecoms really one of the worst businesses in the world ?

I would argue that its one of the worst executed businesses in the world, but not the worst business.

Travel and hospitality would likely be fairer examples of "worst businesses", perhaps especially the airline business.

People say this because accountants don’t like capital spending.

Carriers have 50-60% gross margins. They are critical enough to get special tax treatments to deal with the capital expenses. If the goal is to make money, what would be the “best” business? Drug cartel?

> Carriers have 50-60% gross margins

Indeed. Many people don't realise how amazingly robust margins have remained.

A lot of it is because its such a closed shop which is why they can get away with many things.

Having done some contracting work for telecoms (seen how some of the sausage is made)...

My hunch is they print pallets of cash, then use some large fraction for bonfires.

Who cares about gross margin? EBITDA, Free Cash-flow, and Net Margin are what people care about - especially for a utility...

What are good businesses?

Apple... Saudi Aramco... Google... AWS...

nobody actually cares about margin. you can be entirely unprofitable so long as you show growth quarter after quarter. amazons margins are razor thin if not negative. tesla wasn’t profitable at all until EV legislation, and still struggles to be so

Apple's cell service network is pretty much tapped out at the total active iPhone MAUs...

Sure, Apple's theoretical cell subscribers could grow a lot - but no one is going to care...

It would be such a small part of the profits compared to hardware sales and other services - with a MASSIVE capital cost - probably much higher than phone R&D.

It would be less capital intensive and possibly more profitable for Apple to manufacture their own phones than start their own carrier business... And that's a horrible idea, too...

The idea of starting your own carrier business that isn't an MVNe is almost absurd.

Why doesn't Tesla build their own roads while we're at it?

They thought about it! Remember the boring company?

So is semiconductor fabrication, and Apple has been ridiculously successful as a middle-man there in both directions: Customers get the most advanced chips available at consumer prices. TSMC gets whatever capital they need, either advanced or in guaranteed order contracts.

> Look at their recent BNPL (buy now, pay later) announcement for example. Managing the whole caboodle, including the finance itself, entirely internally.

For what it's worth I think BNPL is simply an attempt by Apple to get some yield on their insane cash pile. Last year they had over $0.2T on hand. [1] They're making it faster than they seem to be able to return it to shareholders.

BNPL is a pretty bad business - margins are low, buyers are generally not qualified in the same way as other lending, ticket sizes are low, and collections aren't worth it (you really gonna repossess my $20 gently-used socks?). However, if Apple has a better way to qualify the customers (a big if)...

They can take ~3-4% of the transaction, net like 0.5% for a 6 week loan, which is like a 4.5% APR. Their margins may be better than peers since they can use their own cash instead of raising debt. Maybe 6-7% APR. It's also short-term debt that turns over fast so it's highly liquid.

My wholly uninformed opinion is that this is more of a cash management product that happens to be built on their data for Apple than a data product per se. After all you can't just roll up at BofA with a $0.2T check and get that kind of APR.

[1] https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-every...

> They can take ~3-4% of the transaction, net like 0.5% for a 6 week loan, which is like a 4.5% APR. Their margins may be better than peers since they can use their own cash instead of raising debt. Maybe 6-7% APR. It's also short-term debt that turns over fast so it's highly liquid.

Apple has said they'll be charging zero interest and zero fees for this service, including zero late fees, so where the yield will be coming from is unclear. That said, I confess that I don't have a deep understanding of the BNPL market.

If they don't collect from buyers, they can collect from sellers. If you look back to when credit cards were new, you had them making shops agree not to charge credit card users more, despite the fees. That put cash users at a newfound disadvantage, and shops had to put up with it because card users were numerous enough.

That's exactly right. BNPLs generally charge more than credit card acquirers do, something in the 3-4% range, but the breakdown of these numbers tend to be closely guarded and that reflects outside estimates. One has to imagine Apple thinks they can command a premium here too.

With respect to cards: cards have a number of advantages for both merchants and customers. Cash is not free to handle and carries risk (theft, etc) and it's really slow. Credit card buyers tend to have larger average ticket sizes (20% larger was the last one I saw) and card buyers have more confidence buying from smaller shops knowing that they can always charge back the merchant if something goes terribly wrong. In a real way chargebacks are a big part of how we got e-commerce.

Merchant agreements generally precluded credit surcharges but they always allowed cash discounts. This is commonly seen at US gas stations to this day. They also prohibited credit card minimum purchase amounts. To my knowledge both of these are no longer true.

Shops aren't putting up with cards so much as embracing them because that's how their customers want to pay, and they don't want to miss out on a sale.

Competition is great, especially when it breaks oligopolies, I just hope stuff like the Digital Markets Act will manage to stop them from abusing their positions to make their solution a monopoly

Kind of like how the only thing net neutrality did was prevent t-mobile from creating Netflix unlimited fast lanes? Or how all those bills states signed into law to encourage high speed networks not only didn't create high speed networks, but legally preventing other companies from competing?

The more this gets legislated the harder it will be for someone to enter the market later on, Apple (among other tech giants) aren't going to sit back while you write the laws, it'll be the other way around.

"the only thing {the threat of} net neutrality"

Note that net neutrality has never been passed as a Federal regulation.

This would be an absolute dream, dealing with carriers has been hell since the beginning. I often do upgrade my phone, but it's been a huge hassle. Sometimes the promos don't work well and they basically wrap you into a contract anyways. I'm honestly just going to pay extra cash and upgrade directly through Apple even though the carrier offers a bigger credit.

If I could cut them out all together and buy an iPhone and cell service with Apple. Done.

> dealing with carriers has been hell since the beginning.

Are you American by any chance ?

This has been solves in other places through regulations

No it hasn't. There wasn't a specific grevience listed so you really dont know if European regulations have solved it or not. I'm an American but have spent years living in Europe and dealing with carriers there has its own frustrations.

These sorts of comments are common but always strike me as having been made by someone with little to no real world experience on the specific issue being discussed.

> you really dont know if European regulations have solved it or not

Ask anybody who has lived in the UK long enough about Vodafone.

The story normally goes something like this:

    - 90s = Dogs bollocks, nobody came close
    - 00s = Started to smell a bit, but still the most robust technical service
    - early 10s = Really starting to rest on their laurels now
    - late 10s – today = Shit, godawful shit.

> with little to no real world experience on the specific issue being discussed.

I lived in France and now I'm in Germany, still using my French sim card, for no additional cost. I can change carriers whenever I want with no delay and transfer my number to the new carrier, all of that for much cheaper than what was available in the US when I was living there.

No contract, no hidden fees, no loops to jump through to cancel a subscription, it just works. I really don't see what one more monopoly would solve.

Feel free to publish your list of grievances, I suspect they're extremely out of the ordinary

> Look at their recent BNPL (buy now, pay later) announcement for example. Managing the whole caboodle, including the finance itself, entirely internally.

Isn't that just tax evasion and/or "investment" in a time with negative interest ?

> Or look at the fact they still haven't rolled out Apple card internationally. My uninformed guess is that it is more to do with "something's brewing" rather than the US cards not working.

Banking and credit card operations are some of the most regulated businesses in the world, and financial authorities have different requirements from country to country, which would make it prohibitively expensive to roll out on a global scale.

We are going to see satphone use on most handsets I think fairly soon (starting with low badwith options). The idea of Apple operating their own carrier is interesting but also sort of terrifying - they are already all about keeping everything in their own ecosystem and making interoperability with other brands a huge PIA - are we going to see the day when Apple devices intentionally barely function with other carriers / brands / OS?

Watching close enough?

This has been Appple's business model and advertising for decades: your digital lifestyle hardware and software solution.

why do you call it disintermediation? apple is still the big intermediate here

Intermediate to what? They own the software, hardware, and are moving toward owning the network and billing relationship.. Intermediate between consumers and app builders maybe, but as they build more features into their own devices (e.g. Apple Maps), even those relationships are being brought into the ecosystem.

> why do you call it disintermediation?

Because Apple want to control the quality of the user experience.

Right now Apple Hardware and Apple Software are tightly interlinked. Apple can do things in software because they design 100% of the hardware, and vice-versa.

There's a lot of stuff Apple do in terms of quality of experience that's only possible because of that tight integration. Stuff that would be impossible to do with generic hardware and generic software.

But equally Apple know that if you buy an iPhone, you are dependent on a carrier for service. Like the rest of the world, it has probably not escaped Apple's attention that the quality of service you get from the carriers is becoming rapidly worse by the day. As a result, an Apple user's poor experience with an iPhone might have nothing to do with Apple but everything to do with the carrier.

Having carrier level integration with iPhone could also open up further user experience improvements (e.g. maybe they could do clever stuff at carrier level to help preserve battery).

As I sit here on an iPad Pro that refused to correctly highlight and copy a piece of your post so I could directly reply to it, I just want you to know that nobody views the whole “Apple can do unique things because they own the hardware/software stack” in a positive light. Apple is very bad at software and I will always stand by that… it is very sad that such nice pieces of hardware are married to some of the worst software.

Subjective, but I'll second this as an Apple user - at least for iOS devices. I mostly like the design, but I'm appalled at how glitchy the interface controls are, for one. And it has been consistently so for years.

Don't even get me started on the Apple TV. I've never been able to reliably use the remote (physical or app).

> Like the rest of the world, it has probably not escaped Apple's attention that the quality of service you get from the carriers is becoming rapidly worse by the day.

In my experience, mobile connectivity just keeps getting better and better. I have lived on both US coasts and traveled to multiple developing countries, and even in places like Zimbabwe I had pretty great connectivity considering where I was.

> In my experience, mobile connectivity just keeps getting better and better.

To clarify ....

When I spoke of "quality of service" above, I didn't mean technical service (although for some carriers it can be a factor), I meant customer service.

I think you'll struggle to find anyone who will say their carrier's customer service has improved in recent years. Carrier customer service, irrespective of what country you live in, is generally globally accepted to only be in the "awful to non-existent" range.

My experience with T-mobile US is one of the things I'll rarely gush over. They are hands-down the best customer service I've ever gotten from a carrier.

Even with several friends/family on our 10-line plan (to share costs) - it's been a breeze to maintain.

> Because Apple want to control the quality of the user experience.

you nailed it.. they are concerned about the "quality of the user experience" and not the billions of dollars at stake?

Is this why Apple artificially limits which machines can be updated to MacOS as well, to ensure the quality of the user experience and not to drive sales?

They aren't mutually exclusive. Quality of the user experience is what people will pay for.

The real word here is "monopolisation".

A monopoly would require they control the entire market for a given product or service. Apple isn't a monopoly in any area - but they are a strong competitor in many areas. They're more like a western take on a chaebol [1] in my opinion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

> Apple isn't a monopoly in any area - but they are a strong competitor in many areas.

New term: "Vertical Monopoly"

Apple is really uniquely positions to just decide to make a (crypto)currency. Push the app to every iPhone, give everyone with an Apple device X amount, and strong support for business + peer-to-peer transactions and you have the best easiest path to mass adoption possible.

You're falling for the standard crypto trap of being a solution in search of a problem. The user experience you're describing is Venmo. Making it use CookCoin instead of USD doesn't make it easier to build, and it isn't really a selling point.

What I'm describing is Venmo + Square. Neither of those 2 things completely implement what I'm describing on their own. Regardless, I didn't say that it had to be crypto. My entire point was they have a the easiest path of any company to critical mass adoption of a service because they directly control the software of half the phones in the US.

How is what you want different than Apple Cash?

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