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iPhone Alarm Bug Leads To Mass European Sleep-in
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."
my girlfriends 3gs (running iOS 4.x) had the same bug this morning.
Fortunately, my $99 android phone woke us up at the right time
People, what a bunch of bastards
and another ridiculous Apple story makes it to the front page.
What a bunch of whiners. Apple tries to do something nice for you, give you a little more time in the morning, and this is how you thank them?
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
I would have gotten a first post if it wouldn't be for those meddling kids at Apple!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
The real bug is that we change the time at all, considering all the problems it brings.
With all new fancy (and not so fancy gadgets), you can NEVER be sure has the damn thing changed the time correctly or not. So you wind up watching weather forecast on TV, only to check the clock in the corner.
Note to engineers everywhere: if your gadget DO change the time, please use some kind of notification that it did so. Otherwise, we can presume that time is wrong, and that we have to manually adjust it
The story fails to mention several key details.
1. The problem only manifests if you have a recurring alarm set.
2. The alram goes off an hour late if it was set before for DST switch.
3. The alarm goes off an hour early if it was set after the DST switch.
If the battery had not died overnight.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
I use mine as an alarm clock. A few weeks ago my brother was asleep on the couch and I couldn't wake him up by calling his name, or poking him in the face, so I set the alarm on my iPhone and it woke him up.
Well, companies like iHome make clock radios and the like that are meant for it. They even make a nice app for i(Phone|Pad) which allows for multiple alarms with sleep music and wake music.
When I traveled on business last, I was pleased to discover that both hotels I stayed in had these and I could use my iPod in the hotel, as well as my iPad propped up on the nightstand. Charging your iPhone and using it as an alarm is fairly easy with these.
Once you have a device with all of your calendaring and email on it, using it as an alarm clock isn't a big stretch. Heck, even my several year old iPod nano has built in alarms that will work if you're in a docking station.
I'm not sure why you might even be remotely surprised by this.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
My iPhone 3g did not have this problem this morning and I am in Europe. Are there people here who really experienced this?
The other oddity is people use their phone as an alarmclock? A smartphone with a battery life measured in hours, probably dead by wakeup time? I'm with the modern generation in that I haven't worn a wristwatch in over a decade, but is it a generational thing that people don't own/use alarm clocks? What do you glance at, at 2am, when you just want to see the time if you momentarily wake up, etc? Get the tiny little phone, unlock it, put on the glasses/contacts, and read the time?
Yes. You plug it in first. Unlocking a phone can generally be done by touch after you've owned it for more than a couple days. And bringing it to your face is a lot easier than sitting up to see the alarm clock if you don't happen to have the right furniture for placing your alarm clock in a better position, which is quite common when you're a 20-something in a cramped apartment. No need to put on glasses, though. At least not for me.
Yep, and then we could wait for months while the carriers fart around rolling out an update for your particular phone's version of android. If they ever do get around to it.
I mean, "Yay, android and open source. Boo apple."
(am I doin it rite?)
The problem isn't that iOS is not open source, the problem is that Apple didn't fix the bug after it appeared a month ago in Australia.
Then take a step outside at noon
Hey, Jim Furyk's iPhone made him oversleep and he still won the FedEx cup worth 10 MEEELION dollars, so quitcher whinin!
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
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
Just out of curiosity, what kind of software is it that you would want to use?
I only ask this because a while back Apple said that they had already paid out $1 billion to developers. Considering that not all apps cost money and that this doesn't include data from Android phones, which have (or will in the near future) similar numbers of sales, it would appear as though there is a lot of software that people want to use.
I use a Nintendo DS as an alarm clock (because it's one of the few things I have to hand that I remember to keep the battery charged on...) and it woke me an hour early today (I'm in Europe). I wonder why the iPhone bug went the other way?
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
People's sanity. :-P
I live in a place with DST -- basically it means in the summer, we get extra-long days so it's light until late into the evening (almost 9pm around the solstice). It shifts the hours of usable daylight into hours people might actually use during the summer instead of it being light out at 5am or something stupid.
It also makes up for the fact that in winter it's dark when you get up and leave for work, and dark by the time you leave for home after work. In winter there's a good 1.5 month period where you don't get to see much daylight -- as short as about 8h42m of daylight. DST doesn't fix this, but it gives us some of it back in the summer.
Much like you can't fathom why we have it -- if you grew up with it, you can't fathom why everyone else doesn't have it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Oh also, I get to set rules, such as wake me up at this time on Monday to Thursday. This time on Friday, this time on the weekend. And once off at this time. All with different ringers.
Never had such a valuable alarm clock.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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?).
You obviously don't know me.
However, unlike the iPhone, my alarm clock does adjust itself for daylight savings.
as Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Cap Verde, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Irland, Italy, Liechtestein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the Vatican have an official holiday.
I do not know about the US. But the author of the original message must be pretty Con-European!
Alarm clock? I haven't needed an alarm clock for almost 4 years.
I'm sure it's merely a coincidence that my eldest child is almost 4 years old now.
Europe is not exactly known for its stellar productivity per capita per hour rates, but I still can't imagine that Apple's negligence didn't still cost $Billions.
It's too bad the time change isn't in August when Europe isn't producing anything. The effect would have been nil.
Cut caffeene and go to be earlier. That fixes the "very heavy sleeper" problem. IT did for me and my wife.
My buddy fixed it by spending 3 years in Iraq. he used to sleep as if he was dead in college... now a fly farting in his room has him awake...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"I wonder why the iPhone bug went the other way?"
Apple - Think different.
I'm starting to think it would be easier to keep track of when Europe is NOT on holiday, rather then when they ARE.
"yes we have 7 fixed working days every year, and 3 floating work days."
Why am I picturing some crazy Rube Goldberg device which hangs a snow collection device out the window that sinks down as it fills with snow and then sets some crazy machine motion that turns on your alarm clock? ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hi, nice to meet you, now you do.
I USED to use my phone as an alarm clock when I was in-between houses and couch-jumping from friend to friend - all of which who still live with their parents.
All in all though - I'm terrible at getting myself out of bed. Sleep is like a drug, my semi-conscious self in the mornings will battle it out mentally on whether I can spare another 5 minutes with my eyes closed or not. My phone, being a touch device, can dismiss the alarm with a simple mash, and that'll be the end of it.
Whereas my alarm clock, even with the snooze button, will continue to go off every 9 minutes at least. I've used this to my advantage though - since I know It usually takes me hitting the snooze button 5 times before getting out of bed, I just set my alarm 45 minutes early. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, in actuallity I get less sleep this way, but it works for me.
Point is though - phones today don't cater to this rather niche area where I want to be able to look over and see what time it is whenever, and not have to pickup my phone or anything. Likewise, I want a large snooze button, and a simple way to turn it off but not so simple you can do it without some focus.
And in before someone says "Why don't you just put your alarm clock (or phone) across the room, forcing you to get out of bed before you turn it off?"
I have tried this, and it results in me falling back to sleep on the floor and not in my bed, which isn't pleasant to wake up to.
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?
I'll venture a guess:
Applications, especially ones using phone APIs, usually aren't running 24/7. At a high level, what they will do is, in some manner, register for an event with the operating system. They will then idle indefinitely until that event occurs, at which point the operating system will give the application execution time and it will respond to that event. The event can be several things, including "when the user taps the screen" and "if the phone is powered on", and notably (for this discussion) can be based off of time, such as "8 hours from now".
My guess is that, when an alarm is set, the alarm calculates the amount of time in the future until it needs to be sounded, then registers with the OS to be woken that much time later (probably via some form of nanosleep iOS API derivative). If the alarm fails to factor in DST when calculating that time difference, then it'll get its event later (or earlier, or whatever) than it was expecting, and sound (and then probably calculate the next time difference and sleep until then).
On the surface, an alarm application could register for more periodic events (clock ticks, UI update loop iterations, or just sleep for seconds at a time) and evaluate if it should sound periodically. This would have easily avoided the DST issue. The problem here is that each time the event gets dispatched, the phone has to wake up to handle it, and such periodic waking would cost unnecessary battery. In fact, the OS knows how / when / for how long to sleep based on scheduler details derived from some form of these event registrations. Applications in general (and especially on battery-consuming devices) should attempt to register for the least number of events as possible, hence (I'm guessing) why they chose the time delay calculation option instead of a periodic one.
We have, and it involves daylight savings time.
We're not making you do a damned thing. If you don't like it, don't do it. You'll just have to keep track of what time we're operating on if you need to be calling us. (And, if we need to be calling you, we need to track that.)
Are you under the impression that you are forced to have DST just because (you think) we said so? Even within North America, there are places that don't do DST.
If your own government makes you do this, bitch to them. We don't care if you change your clocks. Heck, I don't care if you even have a clock.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The iPhone probably stores the time in UTC, like OS X. When daylight savings time ends, that only changes the offset from UTC that is used when displaying time. The alarm was either always stored as UTC or converted to UTC so real time clock hardware can generate an interrupt to wake the phone at the appropriate time.
On the surface, an alarm application could register for more periodic events (clock ticks, UI update loop iterations, or just sleep for seconds at a time) and evaluate if it should sound periodically. This would have easily avoided the DST issue.
Not at all. The problem here is that if you want an alarm at 8am every morning, that's always 24 hours after the previous time, except one day where it is 23 hours later, and one day where it is 25 hours later. How you measure the time is irrelevant, as long as you know that on this one day the alarm must come after 23 hours and not 24.
I worked rotating shift for 12 years. 1 week 1st, 1week 2nd 1 week 3rd, back to 1st... etc... and YES making sure you get a solid 9 hours of in bed time and cutting out caffeine completely made a huge difference.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It is not, as being expensive does not make anything immune to fatal flaws (think spacecraft, Therac-25). Actually more of the code than on an OS may have been written by people predominantly trained in fields other than computer systems engineering.
While allusions to Homer Simpson's workplace could not possibly be taken seriously, in fact trains are stopped for an hour and ERP systems are shut down that night for a reason - as experienced administrators are seriously inconvenienced by, if not feeling uneasy about, DST.
How do you get 9 hours of in-bed time when you've just gotten home from work, haven't eaten in 9 hours, and have to be up to get ready to go back to work in 5 hours? I mean, without breaking the laws of physics.
It is pretty simple. Here's my theory:
1) The user picks an alarm time in his local time zone.
2) The software converts that time to UTC.
3) When you go from daylight saving to standard time, you technically switch between two time zones.
4) But since the alarm time was stored in UTC, the alarm goes off the same time it has always done. Its just that in your new time zone this is an hour later.
So why does the software do all this? Well, its common practice to store your datetime fields in UTC and only convert them to the local time zone for display.
Unfortunately this has some rather bad side effects when its an alarm. :-)
Just use Apple Time Machine to get to work on time.
Because, everything else around us won't change.
We still have to schedule everything else with the world around us...
Right, just like everyone around us doesn't change via DST...or wait, some of us change, some don't, according to regional preference...much like it would be if operating hours shifted instead of clocks...so what's your argument again?
... and, quite frankly, I don't want to feel like I'm getting up at 5am to go to work.
So...the number shown on a clock immediately convinces you that it's later than what your body thinks it is? Seriously?
We mostly view your suggestion of change the working hours as a dumb idea.
Ditto to 'your' DST idea.
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