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

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.

Comments

Whoopsie

[war4peace]

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

Re:Whoopsie

[phantomfive]

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

Re:Whoopsie

[ledow]

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.

Re:Why now?

[denbesten]

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.

Re:Why now?

[Ecuador]

DST doesn't end until November 4th.

Let me guess, you are an Apple developer?

I knew it!

[TeknoHog]

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.