
What is the new Apple U1 chip? - MaysonL
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-new-Apple-U1-chip-and-why-is-it-important/answer/Brian-Roemmele?ch=10&share=7e467f08&srid=Pi3
======
ricardobeat
This 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.

~~~
dweekly
"The Decawave DW1000 Radio IC [3] for example, can move 6.8Mbps of data with
an accuracy that is 100x better than WiFi or Bluetooth. It can reach 290
meters of distance with a very minimal power requirement with a 50x faster
speed compared to standard GPS latency."

None of this makes sense as-written. It is either techno-blither or the author
doesn't sufficiently explain "distance", "power", "speed", "better" or
"accuracy".

~~~
laughinghan
That mostly makes sense to me, it's a chip that allows for both spatially
locating other chips and communicating with them, supposedly with more
bandwidth and further range than WiFi or Bluetooth, while requiring lower
power:
[https://www.decawave.com/dw1000/productbrief/](https://www.decawave.com/dw1000/productbrief/)

~~~
teppifk
I agree with the gp, the quote makes little sense. It seems to take a bunch of
facts from the product marketing but words them in such a way that is highly
tortured and just doesn't make sense. Apparently you didn't parse it correctly
either: More bandwidth? Even 802.11b had greater bandwidth. 6.8 Mbps is not
more bandwidth than WiFi. What the quote is most likely trying to convey is
that the radio has much better positional accuracy, which you didn't seem to
glean in your paraphrase.

100x accuracy seems to imply that the data transmission is 100x more accurate
which is not the cae. The product has high positioning accuracy. "can move
6.8Mbps of data with an accuracy that is 100x better than WiFi or Bluetooth."
is a very bizarre way of saying that to be charitable.

"It can reach 290 meters of distance with a very minimal power requirement"
Very minimal? What is "very". Also in practice, the distance achieved is going
to be dependent on power. So you can't get these maximum distances with
minimal power. Also a bit misleading, as for non-positioning Bluetooth LE is
superior.

"with a 50x faster speed compared to standard GPS latency." This is a tortured
way of saying that position acquisition is 50 times faster than GPS.

In practice, the laws of physics also apply. You're not getting 290m of 6.8
Mbps through any walls with minimal power.

------
gnrlst
While 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.

~~~
rmilejczz
This 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
Yeah, sites which permit upvoting of posts and comments and display a total of
upvotes received on user profiles are really cancerous.

~~~
rmilejczz
I wouldn’t go that far, but when vote count is the primary means end users
rely on to determine whether or not someone is “correct” then yeah, it can be
problematic. I feel the same way about SO, but I wouldn’t extend this
criticism to reddit or hacker news.

~~~
dmix
It's still a compromise when you're depending on people to create user-
generated content for you.

One could argue this article is a net-gain for the community as a whole, even
if he is ultimately hawking buzzwords and his consultancy. We're still getting
this long-form exposition with a bit of research into Apple patents and other
direct sourcing from both Apple and others collected in one place for free.

Content marketing can provide a lot more value to the world than most forms of
marketing.

Additionally, 99% of people are only going to read the first half where he
explains it's an ultra-wideband chip with a few examples then move on. They
aren't going to dig into his futuristic predictions and other consultancy
nonsense, or even look at his name.

Although having to skim through crap like this in order to get to the meat is
a bit annoying:

> Many folks in the payment industry including disruptive startups thought me
> insane and went about becoming redundant when Apple Pay was released. Of
> course I had far more basis than a single Phil image. History is about to
> repeat itself.

This is bad enough to make it almost unworthy of HN. But otherwise it did the
job of answering the question well enough.

------
jwr
The 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?

~~~
billconan
can the signal penetrate objects? for example, when a receiver is hidden
underneath cloths or sealed in a bag?

~~~
jwr
Yes, to a certain extent. Frequencies above 6GHz are easily attenuated,
especially by anything which contains water (so, human bodies), but bags and
clothes are fine.

------
jws
Don’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.

~~~
kelp
Back 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.

~~~
oh_sigh
There'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
There'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
There'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.

~~~
dointheatl
Even better, do this with a card that has a higher likelihood of being chosen
by the spectator—the ace of spades, for instance—and you'll see the trick work
far more frequently than simple probability would suggest.

------
zaroth
So 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
Inside of a dog, there's stuff that absorbs radio waves. It's not a good UWB
environment.

~~~
w-ll
UWB?

~~~
jachee
Ultra Wideband.

Did you read the article?

~~~
anoncareer0212
I 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

~~~
abdulmuhaimin
UWB was repeated 39 times in the article. At that point, the "did you read"
question(with the assumption he didnt read) become legit

------
CaliforniaKarl
I 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!

~~~
Someone
Just 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.

~~~
tln
Hmm, that happens to me when I visit Home Depot. Employed people will lead me
to the item.

Interestingly I also use Home Depot's online store just to look up the
aisle/section/shelf. Stores can have a locator system that doesn't need active
electronics.

~~~
partialrecall
It's really hit or miss in my experience. I've had several occasions at both
Home Depot and Lowes where I ask an employee for help and the response is _"
We don't sell that."_ 5 minutes later after walking the aisles, I find it.

One example, I had recently rented a townhouse with very overgrown brush in
the back yard, thick as a jungle. My weedwacker wouldn't scratch it, so I
wanted a machete. The home depot employee acted like he'd never heard the term
"machete" in his life. I explained what it was, and he shrugged, muttered
something about big knives being illegal (untrue and ridiculous), and walked
away. I found them in the gardening section.

~~~
jfengel
I've also had some very good experiences. One immediately identified a thing I
needed but had no idea of (a coupler to join a PVC waste pipe to an iron one).
Another recently spent 20 minutes trying to locate a thing that inventory said
was in stock but wasn't in the assigned bin. (It's not his fault that the
system can't distinguish between items on display and items stuck, unsorted,
in the high shelves requiring a front-end loader to reach.)

It's very hit and miss. The biggest issue is that it can be very hard to
locate anybody at all.

------
yeldarb
Throw 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
My wife is constantly hunting for one of her Airpods. Just having accurate
location tracking system for them would be amazing.

~~~
gnicholas
The 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.

------
barbegal
Location 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
> 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.

------
mrlambchop
I'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
I 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.)

------
m3kw9
All 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”

------
PascLeRasc
Excellent 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
Apple 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
Whether 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
All iPhones since iPhone 3G (IIRC) have a magnetometer.

------
JonathanFly
>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...

------
stevetodd
I'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.

------
sosodev
Huh, that's something actually interesting about the new phones. I wonder why
it wasn't talked about at all on stage?

~~~
mrkstu
Probably 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
I'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
> 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
No, 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.

------
chiph
How 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
It 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
That 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).

------
svendbt
UWB 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.

------
dwighttk
The 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.

~~~
anko
just make it sound the noise :P

~~~
macintux
The noise originally came out of the currently-active output device, which in
my case at least once was AirPlay, not the iPhone itself. I believe they
eventually fixed that bug.

------
salimmadjd
MKBHD 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)

------
somehnguy
More 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
I 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
This 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.

------
anonu
This 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
I 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.

------
baybal2
There 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

~~~
XnoiVeX
Broadcom?

~~~
baybal2
Washington Research Foundation and another party named by some guy's surname
and word "interests" in it. The later was made of 3 random troll lawyers.

------
r3trohack3r
For 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/)

------
nyxxie
> 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
Apple has talked quite a bit about privacy when tracking devices, in
preparation for iOS 13.

[https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-
bluet...](https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluetooth/)

------
cmpb
I’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
or 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.

------
tlb
My 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
Some of us are a little less organized than others. Knowing which room my keys
are in is remarkably unhelpful.

~~~
tlb
Perhaps 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.

------
phogster
Wonder if they will run into trademark issues when they move on to the next
version of the chip.

~~~
BrentOzar
> 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.

------
JavierRoV
That'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.

------
jon889
How 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

------
bborud
We tried the DW chip last year. It works astonishingly well.

~~~
XnoiVeX
What was your application if you can tell us?

~~~
bborud
Indoor 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.

------
edmoffo
This article deserves a better place than a Quora answer :) Why not a blog
post of a proper article in MIT or somewhere similar?

------
RickSanchez2600
I 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.

------
monk_e_boy
I see how it measures distance and direction, but how does it estimate height?
Are there multiple antennas in the phone?

------
luxuryballs
Dang combine 5G with this and the all seeing eye can follow you around a room
with some serious precision.

------
ryeights
>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
I 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.

------
timpannn
Bought from Samsung ;)

------
sabujp
time to figure out how to jam these signals. I don't want my 3d location
tracked by every guided missile out there

------
qwerqwer
The Biggest Apple Announcement Today Was What Apple Actually Didn’t
Announce—Yet. HaHA!

------
mrfusion
I wonder when they’ll get around to fixing airdrop? Nearby People just don’t
show up most of the time.

~~~
gumby
Likely 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

------
willis936
Read in the voice of Michael Bolton from Office Space:

So it’s like Batman Begins?

