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iPhone Alarm Bug Leads To Mass European Sleep-in

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the yeah-it-was-my-phone dept.

nk497 writes "A flaw in the alarm clock in iPhone 4s gave Europeans a bit of a lie-in this morning. While the Apple handsets automatically adjusted to daylight savings time, a bug in the alarm system meant many were woken up an hour later than they should have been, after clocks rolled back over the weekend. Annoyingly, Australia was hit by a similar problem last month, but Apple failed to fix the problem or even warn users. American Apple fans, consider yourselves warned. The iOS4 bug can apparently be avoided by using one-off alarms, rather than pre-set regular wake-up calls."

6 of 487 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Another day by Americano · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, its a ridiculous story.

    Get a proper alarm clock for redundancy if you're in a job so sensitive that oversleeping once will get you fired, even with no history of tardiness.

    If you're really paranoid, make it a wind-up clock so you don't have to worry about losing power.

  2. Real bug: changing the time by noidentity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The real bug is that we change the time at all, considering all the problems it brings.

    1. Re:Real bug: changing the time by kidgenius · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The British in WWII set their clocks two hours ahead all year long to save on scace resources in order to defeat national socialism.

      So why not just leave it that way if you can save resources?

  3. daylight savings time by Culture20 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not one comment yet about the real culprit here: daylight savings time. If we didn't have it anywhere in the world, then programmers wouldn't have to worry about when DST happens in different timezones (or which places have DST and which don't), or worry about what to do with log files or anything else when time jumps an hour.

    Someone remind me please what we're saving? It's not electricity, because we use lightbulbs before sunrise and after sunset in summer and winter.

    1. Re:daylight savings time by StripedCow · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not one comment yet about the real culprit here: daylight savings time.

      This sounds an awful lot like: the real problem is that you're holding it the wrong way.

      --
      If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
  4. Re:Is this story for real? by ElectricTurtle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't know anybody under the age of thirty who doesn't use their phone as an alarm clock.

    --
    I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit