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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."

1 of 487 comments (clear)

  1. Hate for DST aside, how does this bug even exist? by Animaether · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I see a lot of posts with hate for DST.. that's fine, I'd be happy if it were abolished as well.

    But now back to there being a bug in how the alarm thing is handled on the iPhone. How does that bug even exist?

    If the alarm is set for a particular time, say "7am".. then what does it matter whether or not the clock went back an hour at 3am?
    I can understand the alarm app going a bit batty if the clock went back at 8am (essentially the alarm going off -twice- that day), but given the actual circumstances... how did the alarm decide that it should instead be going off at 8am? The clock, presumably, does give the correct time.. so it's not like its internal time functions don't know what time it actually is. I'm confused. Is this just some manner of shoddy coding going on?

    What's worse is how Apple is handling it... i.e. 'not'. Most of America (some states ignore DST already) is up for its DST change next week. I guess most people are now warned by the media attention (where was that when it was NZ / AU?).