My iPhone 14 Fell Off My Motorcycle and Told My Family I Crashed

Not sure what the author expects the right behavior would be here. Or what the point of the article is.<p>Author was riding on a motorcycle with the feature enabled, and dropped his phone in a way that was indistinguishable from a crash (which he admits). The author even says he&#x27;s grateful the feature exists.<p>But then says &quot;But surely there&#x27;s a better way of detecting real crashes&quot;. Okay? What do he think that might be? No suggestions are made at all.

Here&#x27;s the fix: Secure your hardware. It&#x27;s not Apple&#x27;s problem if you do a poor job. He even stated his belief that the adhesive wouldn&#x27;t be up to the task.. and he was right.<p>Apple doesn&#x27;t even particularly recommend what he&#x27;s doing anyway: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT212803" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT212803</a><p>Edit: to be fair that&#x27;s an electric motorcycle so that&#x27;s not too fair a statement.

&quot;I know false-alarms like mine will be rare, and the potential life-saving benefit far outweighs the inconvenience of my particular situation. But there has to be a better way to distinguish genuine crashes from phone-smashing mishaps.&quot;<p>Just want to stress that training an ML model is going to be really difficult for this scenario, and false positives are to be expected. It isn&#x27;t like this was unexpected either given that &quot;the phone flew off its handlebar mount&quot;.

The most amazing thing about the story is that the iPhone was ripped from its adhesive mount by a bump, flew off the motorcycle, presumable struck the concrete road at 60 miles per hour, and still had enough functionality to activate the emergency crash detection and find and text contacts marked as family!<p>That is amazing!

Honestly, what is the best case scenario for this feature? Sure, text the police, that’s a great idea, but why give your family extreme anxiety with very little information? What are they supposed to do, rush to the scene of the accident? There’s nothing you can do when you get that text but wonder if they’ve died.

Better safe than sorry? This hardly seems like an issue. People’s iPhones aren’t generally going to be falling going 60+ mph.<p>Nice fodder for an article however.

Personally I think it&#x27;s working as intended.

This is a good example of an unanticipated or rare scenario that nobody would have realistically considered when developing and adding a feature. The author&#x27;s suggestion of displaying an alert on an Apple Watch to seek confirmation is a good idea, and will certainly appeal to Apple sales philosophy of integrating services to sell other device. :)

B Franklin said that someone who is willing to give up freedom for security deserves neither. This rider didn&#x27;t get the security for which he surrendered his freedom and got worse.

Don&#x27;t use this feature with a handlebar mount, I think is the lesson. I suspect 99% of these reports are going to be dropped phones and police will learn to ignore them.

(n.b. that I am not the author, the &quot;I&quot; in the title is Douglas Sonders, not me)

<i>&quot;Hey, look! In this case the feature was mistaken!&quot;</i>

Classic IRL product scenario, not accounted for while building the happy path

It’s insane that it’s legal to have a dash-mounted cell phone in view while operating a motorcycle.