Apple Says 'Do Not Disturb' Bug to Resolve Itself on Monday, January 7th

iApl said:

Next year new iPhone with new issues .... Jobs we are missing you!!!

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There were plenty of issues with the iPhone when Jobs was at the helm.

This is such an insignificant issue. It's amazing the fuss that some of you are making over it. Your expectations are way too high for something created by humans.

Lame

Although I wish the virtually unpublicized problem with push of exchange mail would resolve itself in 7 days. That one has been around since day 1 of my iphone 5.

No apologies from Tim Cook in THAT tech note!

WTF: I didn't know that software needed to take a vacation for the holidays!

I'm always a bit shocked when these small things actually do occur, the outrage that people feel. It's as if they never make a single mistake when they are doing their job, and it's some sort of global catastrophe when Apple does. While this situation may not be ideal, it's not the end of the world. And for people who argue that they pay a lot for Apple devices and this shouldn't happen, are they willing to accept the increase in price that comes with Apple deploying a ton of arguably pointless updates all the time. If Apple deploys a 5MB update to millions of customers, how much do you think that will cost them? And do you think they won't be passing this cost onto their customers? People should probably leave DND on more often so that they can focus on what is actually going on around them.

Schmitty11 said:

Why do I feel Apple did this just to **** with us?

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Maybe just to **** with the jailbreak community by releasing more updates. Individual stock apps should be able to update themselves independently from the system like in Mac OS. But with automatic wifi updates, it's not a significant problem for normal users.

Just in time for their commercial.

Remember when the Mac was the only system you could count on to be prepared for Y2K and beyond?

OldSchoolMacGuy said:

Just point out that at least Apple's calendar has 12 months, not 11 like the Android calendar did.

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The difference is, Google pushed out an update to fix the bug. Apple would've just told users the bug would resolve itself in January

You'd think by now, Apple would learn to test these edge cases. Every new year or daylight savings time, it's something else buggy with dates.

jam3andy said:

Although I wish the virtually unpublicized problem with push of exchange mail would resolve itself in 7 days. That one has been around since day 1 of my iphone 5.

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And other unpublicized problems like the 2006 iMac GPU failures and the terrible DVD drives on most Macs... I think half the reason Apple got rid of DVD drives is because they SUCK at implementing them. Never have I had so many problems with optical media. You'd think a @#$%ing $1200 iMac could accept a disc without spitting it out off the desk or getting it stuck for 2 years.

But no, the only things people pay attention to are stupid, insignificant, or even nonexistent iPhone problems. I like the iPhone, but Apple made it so good that I wish it never existed. Now most people are glued to a smartphone.

Wow, something else that doesn't work in iOS 6. Not so surprised. Then they air an ad about how great do not disturb is......irony.

This is really annoying, especially since I had also set it to reject calls except VIP numbers when on Do Not Disturb. Normally a great feature to guarantee a good night's sleep.

It took me until yesterday evening to notice it hadn't switched off after the night (when I read about the bug here) so I could have lost some calls. Not cool. It was even more annoying when it did the same thing this morning. At least I was prepared for it now. This could lead to some serious problems for people having an iPhone for a work phone.

The way Apple just tell us to cope with it until next Monday is even less cool. Although as a developer I totally understand the problem of dev/testing cycles and the time they take up. Still considering the potential problems this bug could cause I would have thought they'd give it a bit more attention.

Hmm. How will it fix itself? What caused the problem in the first place? How do we know it won't happen again next year?

I don't use the feature, but Apple's solution seems odd.

LOL at all the people saying "WHAT DO WE DO NEXT YEAR?".

The bug is a time based bug which is affected until the time they've said. It'll be fixed in the next iOS update, whenever that is (before next year I imagine). And if you want proof it'll fix itself by that date, set your time to it. DND will magically start working again.

antibact1 said:

I'm always a bit shocked when these small things actually do occur, the outrage that people feel. It's as if they never make a single mistake when they are doing their job, and it's some sort of global catastrophe when Apple does. While this situation may not be ideal, it's not the end of the world. And for people who argue that they pay a lot for Apple devices and this shouldn't happen, are they willing to accept the increase in price that comes with Apple deploying a ton of arguably pointless updates all the time. If Apple deploys a 5MB update to millions of customers, how much do you think that will cost them? And do you think they won't be passing this cost onto their customers? People should probably leave DND on more often so that they can focus on what is actually going on around them.

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The issue isn't the bug, or the consequences of the bug, which most people are actually having a snicker about. It's the attitude and competence of Apple that's at question. DND is trumpeted as a major feature of iOS6 - yet a competent programmer could have written and fully tested it in a week, possibly a day. And it doesn't even work! They can't claim 1st of Jan was some unforeseen edge case... unless they thought the Mayan prophesies were true.

Apple seems to have had a couple of "new year" bugs in recent years. I don't want to sound like I'm complaining (and I'm not because none of this has affected me personally), but shouldn't testing for cases like these be part of any unit testing that goes on before a product is released (or perhaps at some point during routine QA)? I can't believe this wasn't caught before now.

And while I think think Apple will issue a minor update that will fix this problem in the future (probably because I don't see why it wouldn't also affect future years), I think Apple's article makes it pretty clear that it's a bug in the current code that will resolve itself after the first week of this year--not that they'll (immediately) issue a software update to do so.

bma said:

LOL at all the people saying "WHAT DO WE DO NEXT YEAR?".

The bug is a time based bug which is affected until the time they've said. It'll be fixed in the next iOS update, whenever that is (before next year I imagine). And if you want proof it'll fix itself by that date, set your time to it. DND will magically start working again.

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It magically fails again on 1st Jan 2014. Apple have shown no sign that they've worked this out yet so don't bet on a fix.

Moorepheus said:

Bad Programmers = Bad Programs. WOW, what a solution.

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Given that they're coming off a holiday, and that they won't be efficient in patch release (as always), it's unlikely they'd deploy anything before then anyways.

Someone made an oopsie in the code but fortunately it only hits this week; next years solution will be baked into 6.1.

If the issue is known and automatically resolves itself before Apple could reasonably push out an update, I don't see why the response is inappropriate. Also, I'm not saying that Apple shouldn't fix things, but here is some perspective:

http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/1...major-issues-plaguing-googles-newest-release/

At least Apple didn't forget the month of December.

Thunderhawks said:

They probably figured out that the best they can is fix it by Monday, i.e. not enough time.

I can't believe people have their panties in a twist over such a non issue.

Since when can we go through life undisturbed?

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I depend on scheduled DND on my iphone to let me sleep without noises, vibrations, or light coming from my phone in the middle of the night. it keeps me (and my wife) sleeping soundly when the phones are charged in the bedroom. regular DND it's a life-saver in a meeting.

but more than that, it's a feature i PAID for. for all of the "it just works" messaging that apple marketing loves to spew, it sure does get a lot of date and time bugs that should NEVER make it out of QC. if one of my customers had to deal with this bug in our software and i said, "don't worry about it, the problem will resolve itself in a couple of days, just don't use that feature" we would be fired on the spot.

if it's a free service, then i can accept a hiccup like this. i know that issuing a software patch might take a few days, and i can be pissed off while accepting that. but that isn't the message, it's "we know about it, it will get fixed automatically after this date, so just live with it" isn't an acceptable response to a bug in a product i PAID for.

maybe you have a lower threshold for quality in what you pay for. i don't.

The issue is most likely a very simple one, and one that date programmers and heck any programmer can hit VERY easily.

In date formatting you use letters to signify the kind of format you want to use - such as MM for month, or MMM for three letter month name. One common mistake, for example, is using YYYY for year and not yyyy. YYYY gives you the year according to the WEEK the day falls in, while yyyy gives you the calendar year. This bug hit Apple in iPhoto a couple years back and even in iOS as well I think. I'm not saying THIS bug is related to the case of a Y, but it most certainly could be something like that.

And they may have tested it in 2011 against 2012 and it was fine - but broke in 2013 for a different reason.

Calendar/date arithmetic is HARD. There are many idiosyncrasies and edge cases and weird things. Anybody here who thinks they could do better is just dreaming.

I've been working with date math for 12 years now and consider myself an expert at it more so than most any developer I know (and I know a lot) and when I bring new developers in they think they know it all - I mean how hard can it be? 28-31 days in a month, 12 months, 24 hour days, etc... right? Add timezones, non-gregorian calendars, leap year, DST, and on top of it all the different formatting across the world and you've got yourself something that isn't simple.

So give Apple a bit of a break. As another poster put it, at least they didn't lose an entire month in their calendar app (cough cough Google).

yg17 said:

The difference is, Google pushed out an update to fix the bug. Apple would've just told users the bug would resolve itself in January

You'd think by now, Apple would learn to test these edge cases. Every new year or daylight savings time, it's something else buggy with dates.

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Google took a bit to resolve the issue. By the time Apple could push an update, the 7th will have passed so there is no reason to rush one.

True they should be testing this stuff. Traditionally Apple has been good about the New Year stuff compared to others like Microsoft. Remember that our computers didn't have to worry about Y2K and even early Macs were compliant.

ikramerica said:

I'm not usually one to cry "unacceptable" but this truly is.

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mighty strong rhetoric for a minor feature that didnt exist a few months ago.

herocero said:

I depend on scheduled DND on my iphone to let me sleep without noises, vibrations, or light coming from my phone in the middle of the night. it keeps me (and my wife) sleeping soundly when the phones are charged in the bedroom. regular DND it's a life-saver in a meeting.

but more than that, it's a feature i PAID for. for all of the "it just works" messaging that apple marketing loves to spew, it sure does get a lot of date and time bugs that should NEVER make it out of QC. if one of my customers had to deal with this bug in our software and i said, "don't worry about it, the problem will resolve itself in a couple of days, just don't use that feature" we would be fired on the spot.

if it's a free service, then i can accept a hiccup like this. i know that issuing a software patch might take a few days, and i can be pissed off while accepting that. but that isn't the message, it's "we know about it, it will get fixed automatically after this date, so just live with it" isn't an acceptable response to a bug in a product i PAID for.

maybe you have a lower threshold for quality in what you pay for. i don't.

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Turn your phone on vibrate at night. Yes, you paid for this feature - out of all of iOS I'm sure its worth about a cent or less. Ask Apple for that back.

The gist is - life isn't perfect. No program is perfect. No app is perfect. No OS is perfect. DND not working for a week - I'd prefer Apple had fixed it and given an update to fix it a month ago, or even now. Given QA and testing it probably wasn't feasible. But get over it - I pay for the roads with my taxes and sometimes they are unavailable. I pay for internet and sometiimes its down.

Apple hires extremely good engineers. Firing them over this is way over the top.

I'd bet out of all the people up in arms in this thread, less than 10% actually use the Do Not Disturb feature. The rest are those that love to complain and make a big deal of things that don't directly effect them.

mw360 said:

The issue isn't the bug, or the consequences of the bug, which most people are actually having a snicker about. It's the attitude and competence of Apple that's at question. DND is trumpeted as a major feature of iOS6 - yet a competent programmer could have written and fully tested it in a week, possibly a day. And it doesn't even work! They can't claim 1st of Jan was some unforeseen edge case... unless they thought the Mayan prophesies were true.

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I guess you are one of those programmers who has never made a mistake. You should probably go and work for Apple to prevent this from ever happening again. And I don't see what the problem is with their attitude. If you look at the turnaround time for Google's December bug, it was filed on November 14, the patch went in on November 19, and OTA started rolling out on November 27. If Apple was to have similar timing, it could say that an update would be out in 2 weeks, or they could say it will resolve itself in 5 days. Which is better?