That Time Apple Weather Almost Got Me Stuck in the Snow
What a missed forecast taught me about product trust
The group chat lit up. Would Friday evening’s storm be a 6 inch blizzard as NOAA predicted or a “wintery mix” non-event Apple Weather was forecasting? Spoiler - it snowed a solid 5 inches and up until the event itself Apple insisted there would be no snow.
I’m breaking code freeze 🥶 (ha!) to publish this special edition of Shipping on Fridays because this weather miss was more than just a funny moment. It’s a case study of a daily usage product getting a core use case wrong and how misses like this erode customer trust and increase churn.
👋 Hey, I’m Alex. I write Shipping on Fridays to explore the craft of how great products get built and what we can learn from the people behind them. I publish 1–2x a month, and every post is meant to be fun, useful, and a little unexpected; from design sprints to sailing races to holiday chaos. If you’re into learning, product or design, this is for you.
Prelude to the Storm
I did not want it to storm. On Friday morning, I was taking my family into Brooklyn to see a Monet exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum (highly worth it!). Over breakfast my dad asked if I was concerned about the weather. I wasn’t. Apple had said that there was a “wintery mix” coming in later that day.
Then my dad showed me NOAA’s forecast:
Still dubious, I reached out to the dad group chat to get their consensus:
The Storm Comes for Apple
Apple has built its brand on reliability and trust. Back in 2015 when I joined Hipmunk I remember someone asking one of the co-founders why everyone only used Macs and the answer quickly came back “because we need everyone’s computer to just work”.
My partner and friends will shame me on this if I don’t come clean - I was a late Apple convert. In fact I explored both Windows Phones (yes, I was part of that 1%) and Android before coming over to the Apple ecosystem in 2019 (so late, I know!). I haven’t looked back. Why? Because Apple makes everything easy and “it works”.
In this era when the Federal government is shrinking and shirking some of its traditional responsibilities, it seems easier to trust Apple before NOAA.
Except when you can’t. Except when the app shows a government-issued winter storm warning predicting 5–8 inches, on the same screen as “wintery mix.” Why does the app not defer to NOAA in cases of a major discrepancy? Perhaps this use case hasn’t been considered. In this case, the simplest explanation may be the most likely: Apple missed this storm and doesn’t have any logic to validate its own forecast against NOAA’s warnings.
Another curious aspect about this storm forecast was that Apple was correct on the temperature forecast - the high would barely get above freezing. Intuitively if the temperature is below freezing if there’s precipitation it will be snow, yet Apple still insisted on a combination of “rain” and “wintery mix”.
For a weather team, forecasting accuracy should be a primary success metric. It’s easy to imagine a growth engagement loop revolving around accuracy: I try Apple Weather, it gets the forecast right, I dress/plan my day appropriately, I use Apple Weather again and recommend it.
Conversely, in this situation, I’m learning the lesson that I shouldn’t use Apple Weather in the snow. This might lead me to experiment with other weather apps, reducing my usage of Apple Weather from daily to occasional. We’ve seen this before. Does anyone remember the early days of Apple Maps?
How might Apple Weather Improve? What might we learn?
Clearly this Snow storm was an edge case (I’ve found Apple Weather highly reliable, although as Pat pointed out on the group chat Apple tends to get snow forecasts consistently wrong). If we suspend reality and pretend to be on the Apple Weather team, what might we do?
First, as discussed, forecast accuracy should be one of our core success metrics. Why? Because the more often our forecasts are accurate the more our customers will turn to directly use Apple Weather. Forecast accuracy will propel growth when high and can spur churn when low.
Given this, it would be important to understand when we are wrong and to uncover patterns in our errors. I’m curious if the Apple Weather team has recognized that they got the NYC / CT snowstorm of Dec 26 wrong. Is there a pattern of misses with snow? As the pretend Weather PM I’d want to get an alert when our forecast deviated so strongly from reality.
Coming back to reality, are there proverbial snowstorms in our own products? What are core aspects of our products that we don’t do as well as we should and could be degrading customer trust?
The Aftermath
I paid attention to NOAA and we left Brooklyn before the snow really started. Had I trusted Apple blindly I would have stayed in Brooklyn later (our original plan was to have dinner there) and we would probably have gotten stuck somewhere on the road between Brooklyn and Connecticut.
In a heartfelt effort to help Apple learn and grow I’ve sent this post to a few people I found on LinkedIn who work at Apple Weather.
As with other posts, I have come to ‘blindly’ trusting you for truth and transparency. You continue to build my faith with anecdotes that are easy to digest and believe with a huge nod to real life vs tech speak.