An issue with Apple Weather has been making rounds, prompting silly speculation that the app was designed to avoid showing 69° as a temperature. Nothing could be further from the truth—in reality, this odd bug is a programming error that has already been fixed in iOS 15.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS:
- The Weather app isn’t showing “69” as a temperature due to a bug
- Don’t worry, this is basically an integer math conversion glitch
- The issue is non-present in iOS 13 and the iOS 15 beta
Apple Weather’s 69 problem is a programming error
You may have read reports that Apple’s built-in Weather app on iPhone for some reason won’t say it’s 69 degrees Fahrenheit outside when in fact it is.
Reputable publications like The Verge even speculated that Apple may be attempting to cut down on 69-related humor. Such a preposterous notion would work to draw clicks to The Verge article, but it’s not true. And if it were true, that would be a true PR disaster for Apple.
Chaim Gartenberg, The Verge:
If you’re an iPhone user, the weather is always a particularly nice 70 degrees. Or 68 degrees. Any temperature but 69 degrees, actually, because it turns out that the built-in weather app on some versions of iOS—including the current version, iOS 14.6—will refuse to display the internet’s favorite number, even if the actual temperature in a given location is, in fact, 69 degrees.
One possible explanation for such a weird error, shared on Twitter, is quite illuminating.
Most likely a rounding error, going from C to F, 20C is 68F, 21C is 69.8F. If that's the cause you should not be seeing 65, 67, 71, 74 either for example.
— Marc-André Dufresne (@theMarcDufresne) July 13, 2021
Instead of purposely avoiding showing “69” as temperature, it appears that Apple may be sourcing data for the Weather app in Celsius and then converting it to Fahrenheit.
For example, 20 degrees Celsius converts to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, while 21 degrees Celsius converts to 69.8 degrees Fahrenheit — which rounds up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The app appears to have similar issues with temperatures like 65 degrees (where 18 degrees Celsius converts to 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit, while 19 degrees Celsius is 66.2 degrees Fahrenheit).
And there you have it.
Kinda hilarious pic.twitter.com/469ffcMHzC
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) July 13, 2021
“Sometimes a cigar is just an integer math conversion glitch,” John Gruber summed it up nicely.
Don’t blame Apple’s desire for total control for Weather’s “69” problem because sometimes a stupid bug is just that, a stupid bug that needs to be squished. For those wondering, only the current stable version of iOS, iOS 14.6, is affected by this issue.
The Weather app on the iOS 15 beta does not suffer from the same issue, suggesting Apple was aware of this problem and moved to fix it. Moreover, the bug is non-present on iOS 13.