Slashdot Mirror
Irony: iPhone 5S Users Reporting Blue Screen of Death
MojoKid writes "It's been a long time since many have seen a dreaded 'blue screen of death' (BSoD), but it's back and in the most unlikeliest of places. Oddly enough, some Apple iPhone 5S owners are reporting BSoD errors, though they're a little different from the ones you may remember seeing on Windows desktops. Rather than spit out an obscure error code with a generic description, some iPhone 5S devices are suddenly turning blue before automatically restarting. The Numbers app in Apple's iWork suite, a free program with new iPhones, seems to be the primary cause, though BSoD behavior has also been observed in other applications, according to complaints in Apple's support forum."
Guru Meditation: BSoD.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
Aside from the whole 'a tightly sandboxed "app" taking down the system' thing (which makes one wonder if Apple's apps follow the same rules as everyone else's, or whether there is some Nasty bug in an API), don't iDevices use a totally different design for their screen of death? Macs, certainly, both PPC and Intel, can be made to execute BSOD-level crashes; but the process looks totally different.
Of course, without Job's magic aura Apple software is as crappy as Windows software. ;)
Hence the BSOD. Iphone reliable as always.
Sounds like somebody's grammar checker had a blue screen...
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
There is a great deal of evidence to indicate we are no longer capable of advancing software.
It has been remarked that if we built buildings the same way we build software the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Take a look around. The government apparently spent $165 million on a web site that doesn't work.
There's no discipline in software development. It's slapped together to meet an artificial deadline. It's considered done if it compiles. It's shoved out into the marketplace so everyone can stuff their pockets and then all the developers are fired to make way for the new employees who will design the next piece of shit.
The only measure of how good software is depends on how shiny and "innovative" the user interface is. What the software actually does is utterly irrelevant.
You find it everywhere... I mean, just Google that phrase. Let me see what the fan boys will spin this out...
"It has been remarked"
yes, and we know WHO made the remark.
For such a view/picture being displayed, I wouldn't blame the iPhone for restarting ! :)
... They're just looking at it wrong.
They didn't make a shiny golden backplate for you to waste your time looking at the screen, people!
Who would shrug and tell you it's a driver problem, Apple will actually fix their problems.
Linux Fanbois will of course howl, even though they don't use Apple products. Pussies.
. . .these turn out to be forced/silent restarts by Apple on the backend, due to a laundry list of reasons best left to others - don't ask how I know.
When I searched the Apple support communities for BSoD and even just "blue" I find issues dating all the way back to 2008 across all Apple products and OSs, but no cascade of BSoD reports recently. I've been using the iWorks suite on my iPhone for weeks and no BSoD yet. I feel deprived lol.
Uh oh, looks likes Job's Reality Distortion Field is collapsing. :p
If this keeps up, Macs may start turning into fruit or something.
Poor little Apple users. I'll just leave this here, shall I?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Anti Apple comments just flame the fanboys. Jokes about hipsters and "gone to the dogs" don't help but get the fanboys rabid again, and they don't add to the discussion.
Ok, BSOD: So what? Is this a trend? I Haven't heard of it from Apple in a long time, so no.
Linked to post Jobs era? Probably.
End of the world for Apple? No
Apple as bad as Microsoft ? No
No one is perfect, not even Apple. Don't lose sight that valid comments are the best defense against any fanboy, and rest assured I've thought about starting "punch an Apple fanboy in the head" day numerous times.
Lattice has an amazing FPGA chip with non-volatile memory with a flaw. It will at times lose what you've programmed into it. They've declined to acknowledge this flaw.
Our illustrious engineering department chose BLUE as the color of the boot loader. It's not normally displayed. However when Lattice Semiconductor's special needs child loses it's mind it caused a blue screen of death.
I publicly mocked them on global company emails over this.
In the next product they chose piss yellow as the boot load screen.
Hey it's better than Guru Meditation.
It's slow as molasses since the upgrade, and this is after installing the subsequent updates. What the fuck, seriously? As if they hadn't had an opportunity to learn with the whole iOS 4 and iPhone 3G debacle?
I should have known better. The iPhone 4 is three years old. Never trust an upgrade beyond two years after your device's introduction.
(At least not from Apple.)
It's Apple's new "iBoot" feature, which automatically restarts the phone when it detects an NSA probe, acting as if you noticed the spies and shut off your phone as a result. The more frequent your reboots, the more interested the goobernmint is in you. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
also an apprenticeship system where you learn from pros in the field with real work. Not some professor reading from a book and / or loads of theory.
Siri, WTF just happened? Siri?!
The crashes appear to only (mainly?) affect the new 64 bit CPUs. It would appear that some parts of the API/apps use code hardcoded to 32 bit applications. If this is really the case, then it should be a matter of time before bugfixes are released. It's not ok for a phone of that pricetag, but it isn't a complete disaster either.
I have seen people blame objective C as the culprit as some other programming languages have abstraction levels high enough to make the code immune to bugs due to CPU type. The thing is that C/C++/objC can write code with great performance, which translates to longer battery life. It is possible to write code immune to 32/64bit bugs in all of those 3 languages, but it takes more skill from the programmers and increase development time and costs. It doesn't surprise me if 64 bit considerations was skipped intentionally before Apple announced 64 bit phones. Testing 64 bit software before the 64 CPUs became available was naturally out of the question as well and 3rd party developers was given access to new phones possibly way too shortly before the release.
This excuse works much better for 3rd party software developers than for Apple as we would assume insight knowledge of new CPUs, but maybe it was secret inside as well due to risk of spies or leaks. It might also be a sign that the software was rushed a bit too much. People also complain about power usage in iOS 7, which also hints immature software.
is this too much to ask?
I have seen Android devices that randomly shut down, and one that won't reboot if you let the battery go too low. I own a few that do that
After a while, this Ford versus Chevy nonsense gets old. All devices have issues. I own some of each, and have had some issues with each. Usually fixed with an update.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The BSOD is a patented invention of Microsoft.
Microsoft: obscure error code with a generic description Old Apple: Bomb icon that says 'Error' New Apple: Plain blue screen, nothing else So simple and refined!
Could it be in the iCloud API? Native apps like Numbers store docs in iCloud.
Apple is the new Microsoft.
Just with a shinier surface.
some of the DOS extenders crashed time to time
Could be, but today I'm seeing that setting the text in a UITextView in a thread other than the main thread will cause iOS 7 to freeze irrecoverably. So the bug could be in a lot of places, I guess. They've changed a lot.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We were holding it wrong!
And thats a damn phone OS. I'm quite scared of how Mavericks will turn out. Or the OS X team is still competent as they used to be?
"The Numbers app in Apple's iWork suite"..."seems to be the primary cause"
Apple has caught up with Microsoft.
User apps are not allowed to use multitasking,
User apps are allowed to do anything for around ten minutes after they are shut by the user (they may be killed sooner if they use too many resources or the foreground app needs all the resources).
User apps can also have periodic tasks that run in the background (in iOS7).
User apps can also run indefinitely in the background under some conditions, like for navigation or... for background audio. So it might be some hiccup in the text to speech system operating while the app it is attached to is running in the foreground. I would think anything reading text generally would keep reading even if you closed the application, though it would depend on the application and how it set up the audio session...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
App crashes used to be fairly frequent on the iPhone, while system crashes were much less frequent, but happened now and then. In recent years, system crashes have pretty much vanished, while app crashes have gotten a lot less common. I don't think I've seen a single system crash with iOS 7 on my 4s, which is unusual for a major OS revision. My new 5s does appear to crash a bit more. I see an app unexpectedly quit every day or two, and I've had 2 or 3 system crashes--more like the frequency of crashes I remember from the first year or two of the iPhone.
Where did anyone get this idea of the BSOD taking a hiatus? I deal with it almost daily in Windows 7. Maybe these win7 systems were not informed of the BSOD furlough?
Here is video of an older iPhone and os making exact same blue screen/restart.
Seems to take different actions to trigger, but not sure this is a new bug.
From the comments sounds like it wasn't too uncommon either..
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KjyQLlEHomQ
-Lod
For every one iphone there are approximately 4.5 android phones and there's a darn good reason for that. The overly-fragile, drug-trip colored UI-having, overpriced hardware created by suicidal semi-slaves at Foxconn isn't a good product. It just isn't! This isn't 1999. This is Apple 2013, get use to it. On the same note, sell any and all Apple stock you may have.
BSoD is MS's intellectual property. If curved rectangles are protected, so does BSoD. This might confuse consumers too.
My work Windows 7 machine BSoDed all over the place not a month and a half ago.
Windows still BSoDs just fine, TYVM.
LETS POST IT TO SLASHDOT!!!!1!11!!ONE!
Seriously, how the hell is this news? Sure, a brand new phone crashing a lot is a pretty newsworthy item, but why does everyone go "Oh how "ironic"?!?!". It's not ironic, it's blue, much like the crash screen on a PSP or some Nintendo DS'. Just because Microsoft used it predominantly doesn't automatically make this a news item.
I'm sure if it came up with a Mac OS X kernel panic, or a screen of death of another colour, it wouldn't have made it on Slashdot....
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Well, yes, and no... learning from experienced people is fine but care should be taken that the 'apprenticeship' does not turn into 'indentured service' as it does so often - have a look at other fields where this system is used to see what I mean. Often the 'apprentice' is just used as cheap labour to do most of the work for only a fraction of the pay while the 'master' takes home the profit. It also opens the doors for protectionist systems comparable to the medieval guilds where your ability to work in a given field depends on getting yourself accepted by the guild. If you go down this route you'll be up to your knees in ITIL (et al) without an escape route.
--frank[at]unternet.org
We really run Windows 95 under the hood. You guys finally caught us.
-Apple
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
No it could not. It could be anywhere but that. That is the one place it couldn't be. All software ever written has bugs except the iCloud API.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Too
I prefer if my systems don't BSOD if they've been restored from backup. You know, a backup and restore that actually works, rather than bricking the device.
They still teach JAVA and student graduate unable to begin work at leading companies.
Classes should be set up to incorporate multiple technologies in a single semester curriculum.
Microsoft Server, C# web development, and SQL Server database administration should be one of multiple tracks employed to begin graduating successful candidates for new-hires.
Another track: Linux system administration, Ruby on Rails, and MySQL database administration.
Yet another: Linux system administration, JAVA, and Oracle database administration
Argue as much as you like but that is the absolute truth.
You can't pick one area to master anymore. You'll always need multiple groups to fall back on.
Software people normally educated in engineering, and the systems they build fail. Does that mean that engineering a software system isn't engineering, or that non-engineers failed to engineer it properly?
Novels, movies, hairstyles, etc are not systems subject to unyielding laws which must be accounted for, or the project fails. Physical systems, such as buildings, and software systems such as databases ARE subject to unbreakable laws which will cause or prevent failure.
Engineering is about applying a set of known rules which govern the behavior of systems to a specific design. You can calculate the shear load on a bridge member, based on a specific amount of vehicle traffic, and know exactly how thick your steel must be. That's engineering. You can calculate what the IO load will be on a specific storage unit, based on a specific amount of web traffic, and know exactly how wide your RAID must be. That's also engineering.
The two problems above are extremely similar, and there is a very similar process for determining the optimal engineered solution in both cases.
Most programmers don't use proper engineering methods, and most programmers don't produce reliable designs. That's because they aren't using properly engineering methods, not because proper engineering methods don't apply.
By the way, you're distinction about physical objects vs. conceptual systems is, in a word, wrong. The reason the Obamacare sites can't take the load has everything to do with the radial velocity of a rotating mass known as a "hard drive". The drive spins at 10,000 RPM. The system tries to read opposite sides of the drive 40,000 times per second. Engineering fail.
The first sentence of my post was missing two words. That should read "software people are not normally educated in engineering ".
Thus, they often fail at engineering systems, even if they are good at coding Hangman.
It's ironic because of Apple's long history of mocking Microsoft. C:\ongratulations Apple!
Thanks. Good read. I love computer history.
'bricking'? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Really? Is that magical color-changing pony-friend metal they've made the case out of, or is it just the screen presenting a solid blue image?