Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Some Apple Watch Series 4 Models Are Frequently Crashing and Rebooting Due to a Daylight Saving Time Bug (macrumors.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-hard-could-it-be dept.

Some Apple Watch Series 4 owners in Australia experienced crashes and reboots on Saturday due to a bug that surfaced because of the daylight saving time change. From a report: According to Reddit users hit by the Apple Watch bug, the root of the problem appears to be the Infograph Modular face's Activity complication, which displays a timeline graph with hourly data for the user's Move calories, Exercise minutes, and Stand hours. When daylight saving time (DST) lops an hour off the typical 24-hour day, the Activity complication is apparently unable to compute the change and draw the timeline graph with only 23 hours, which throws the Apple Watch into an endless reboot loop until the battery runs out.

11 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Whoopsie by war4peace · · Score: 3, Insightful

    One more reason to do away with that monstrosity called DST”.

    --
    ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
    1. Re:Whoopsie by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, this is a reason to keep DST. So we can easily see and laugh at the incompetent programmers.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Whoopsie by ledow · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But you'd rather these people who can't use long-established timezone libraries, handling protocols and data formats did things like monitor your heart rate and ran your car instead?

      The problem here is not DST or the complexity of it... if that were the case the banking industry, Internet, phones, etc. would fall over at the same time because of the same problems.

      The problem is that someone at Apple doesn't understand how to handle dates properly despite there being long-established libraries for exactly that. And they didn't bother to check (i.e. test) adequately enough before releasing millions of dollars of mass-market products.

      The problem is lax development and testing. Not the complexity of handling something that billions of devices owned by billions of people around the world handle every year just fine.

    3. Re:Whoopsie by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, from one point of view you are right.

      However, as I worked quite a long time in the energy business: DST is a pain in the ass. Not only because of programmers making mistakes (I would not call that incompetent ... what again are the rules for a leap year? Are you sure you know them all? It is only 2 rules, though, or 3, depending how you count)

      Mistakes are also made in the requirements/business analysis. And if a programmer says: "uh, that does not look right" often he gets stared down and challenged: who are you to know better than me.

      Regarding "energy business": You have every day a kind of spread cheat with 24 hours as columns down. For every power plant you have 4 rows, planned power production for every quarter hour.

      Two days of the year are an exception. One day has 23 columns, one has 25.

      Then again if you e.g. want to sent power from Germany to France or to Poland, you have to prepare a "schedule" for your grid feed in, 24h ahead (erm, 23h? 24h? 25h?).

      The grid operator is working his grid, similar as pointed out above, with 24h columns and his balancing/reserve power plants according to the schedule. But: two times in the year the schedule has not 24 but 25 or 23 columns.

      One unix idiot ... idiot because I considered him a friend, until he started bullying me in some jobs ... once said: "it is so easy! Just schedule everything in UT!" What he did not grasp is: everything is scheduled in UTC. But you nevertheless want one day in the year to see your whole day as a 25h day, and the other day in the year you want to see your whole day as a 23h day ...

      It is quite important that my French or my Polish power company friends agrees that we are at 2:00A or 2:00B at night for a power feed into the grid.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    4. Re: Whoopsie by jrumney · · Score: 2

      Typical junior software developer response: change the world to make the programmer's life easier.

  2. Re:Why now? by denbesten · · Score: 4, Informative

    DST doesn't end until November 4th.

    From TFA, "Some Apple Watch Series 4 owners in Australia". Australia DST started on Oct 7th. It will not end until April 7, 2019.

  3. Re:Why now? by Ecuador · · Score: 5, Funny

    DST doesn't end until November 4th.

    Let me guess, you are an Apple developer?

    --
    Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
  4. Re: Professor Fritzen Posten by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 2, Informative

    The Apple Watch has plenty of bugs in it I can imagine not just this one

    Citation, please.

    Learn to internet, son. I found this link on the first page of search results for "apple watch bug list". When you figure out how to use google, you can stop asking so many stupid questions.

    Unfortunately, the article you linked-to is NOT DATED, and the only reference to any date whatsoever was September 2017 and WatchOS 4.01; so there is no way to know for sure whether this is a list of already-addressed issues by the time WatchOS 5.0 (and the Apple Watch Series 4) came out a few weeks ago, or not.

    Hint: Already-Addressed issues are no longer called "issues".

    So, it seems that YOU are the one that needs to learn to internet.

  5. I knew it! by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Daylight 'saving' time is a bug in any sensible timekeeping system.

    This is a timely (ahem) topic in the EU, as we have recently decided to ditch the biannual idiocy for fixed timezones. The remaining problem is that member countries can decide on which timezone to use, which might not be the solar one. So proponents of DST are campaigning for year-round DST (solar + 1). To me that sounds even sillier than current DST changes -- if you're going to make it permanent, you might as well fix your working schedule instead of redefining time itself. ("I want to go to work 1 hour earlier, but I still want it to be 8 o'clock, so I'll just move the definition of 8 around until I'm satisfied.")

    Meanwhile, several European countries are already on a non-solar timezone in favour of Central European Time. It's an interestingly rational alternative to solar time, but for us Finns it would be the "solar - 1" zone, in direct opposition to the DST camp. So one can hope that we'll compromise on the solar zone.

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  6. Re:"when daylight saving time" wait, what? by Darinbob · · Score: 2

    DST changes at different times in different countries. The November change in the US is particular to a relatively recent act of congress; many countries follow the US lead but also many do not.

  7. Re:"when daylight saving time" wait, what? by Darinbob · · Score: 2

    Yep, you need ability to test the device; which means ability to turn off time synching with NTP or servers or a way to use special testing servers, stick it on a closed network, etc. I have had QA tell me "but if I change time on the device it will screw up all my other tests!", but that's just how it is so schedule extra testing time.