alt Hacker NewsMy thousand dollar iPhone can't do math
Comments
I wish he would have tried on a different iPhone 16 Pro Max to see if the defect was specific to that individual device.
>"What is 2+2?" apparently "Applied.....*_dAK[...]" according to my iPhone
At least the machine didn't say it was seven!
I clicked hoping this would be about how old graphing calculators are generally better math companions than a phone.
The best way to do math on my phone I know of is the HP Prime emulator.
Low level numerical operation optimizations are often not reproduceable. For example: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/doc... (2013)
But it's still surprising that that LLM doesn't work on iPhone 16 at all. After all LLMs are known for their tolerance to quantization.
Posting some code that reproduces the bug could help not only Apple but you and others.
I also would like to see if the same error happens in another phone with the exactly same model.
Maybe this is why my damn keyboard predictive text is so gloriously broken
My thousand dollar iPhone can't even add a contact from a business card.
I love to see real debugging instead of conspiracy theories!
Did you file a radar? (silently laughing while writing this, but maybe there's someone left at Apple who reads those)
Have you heard of the Calculator app?
Here’s one that kills me:
- Tightening some bolts, listening to something via airpods
- Spec tells me torque in Nm
- Torque wrench is in ft lbs
- “Hey Siri, what’s X newton meters in foot pounds?”
- “Here’s some fucking website: ”
[flagged]
You don't buy Apple products because of the quality, you buy it because its more expensive than the value of it. Its a demonstration of wealth. This is called Veblen good, and a phenomena called out as early as Thomas Hobbes.
What you need to do is carry 2 phones. A phone that does the job, and a phone for style.
I didn't invent the laws of nature, I just follow them.
Perfect conclusion: my expensive and rather new phone is broken by design, so I just buy an even newer and more expensive one from the same vendor.
The heroic attempt at debugging this though makes me sympathize with all of those engineers that must be doing low-level LLM development these days and getting just noise out of their black boxes.
Methodology is one thing; I can't really agree that deploying an LLM to do sums is great. Almost as hilarious as asking "What's moon plus sun?"
But phenomenon is another thing. Apple's numerical APIs are producing inconsistent results on a minority of devices. This is something worth Apple's attention.