Since yesterday, I've observed some really odd GPS-related behaviors on my iPhone running iOS 17.5, my wife's iPhone running 17.4.1, and my MacBook running macOS 14.4.1, all in the same location (our apartment) in New York City. It started with our HomeKit lighting turning on and off, seemingly at random. The cause of this was our "last person leaves" and "first person arrives" location-based automations configured in the Home app. For some reason, our phones were flipping back and forth between thinking they're inside and outside our home's geofence. Disabling the location-based Home automations put the issue to rest.
Once I realized the issue was GPS-based, I opened Maps and realized that it thought I was in San Francisco, somewhere in the Mission District. Then, within a second, it snapped back to my actual location in NYC. Given Apple's HQ, I wouldn't be surprised if the SF location is a fallback coordinate for when GPS can't resolve a real location, but that's just a guess. Over the next few minutes, I was able to reproduce inconsistently by closing and reopening the maps app.
I thought the issue was limited to iOS 17.5, then my wife reported the same San Francisco GPS issue in Google Maps on her phone on iOS 17.4.1.
Finally, today, my M1 MacBook Pro 14" also exhibited the GPS issue when I noticed that it had reset its time to California (PDT), even though, again, I'm on the east coast (EDT). I had to turn off "Set time zone automatically using your current location" to get the time zone corrected. And sure enough, after waiting a few minutes and coming back to the Date & Time settings, it had picked up my actual location on the east coast once again.
Here's an example of the issue happening:
And then a few seconds later after the GPS found me again:
I'm willing to chalk this up potentially to the solar storm, but my understanding is that it has subsided since this past weekend. But given the impact to 3 different devices running different OSes, I'm struggling to think of an explanation besides local GPS satellites having issues. But I'm in NYC — you'd think there would be more reports of this if that were the case. Anyone else experience similar issues lately?
Once I realized the issue was GPS-based, I opened Maps and realized that it thought I was in San Francisco, somewhere in the Mission District. Then, within a second, it snapped back to my actual location in NYC. Given Apple's HQ, I wouldn't be surprised if the SF location is a fallback coordinate for when GPS can't resolve a real location, but that's just a guess. Over the next few minutes, I was able to reproduce inconsistently by closing and reopening the maps app.
I thought the issue was limited to iOS 17.5, then my wife reported the same San Francisco GPS issue in Google Maps on her phone on iOS 17.4.1.
Finally, today, my M1 MacBook Pro 14" also exhibited the GPS issue when I noticed that it had reset its time to California (PDT), even though, again, I'm on the east coast (EDT). I had to turn off "Set time zone automatically using your current location" to get the time zone corrected. And sure enough, after waiting a few minutes and coming back to the Date & Time settings, it had picked up my actual location on the east coast once again.
Here's an example of the issue happening:
And then a few seconds later after the GPS found me again:
I'm willing to chalk this up potentially to the solar storm, but my understanding is that it has subsided since this past weekend. But given the impact to 3 different devices running different OSes, I'm struggling to think of an explanation besides local GPS satellites having issues. But I'm in NYC — you'd think there would be more reports of this if that were the case. Anyone else experience similar issues lately?
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