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iPhone Clock Bug Prevents Alarm Triggers after New Year's

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Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
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Macworld summarizes findings first reported by Engadget. Apparently a bug in the iPhone clock app prevents non-recurring alarms from properly triggering on New Years day.
I was able to confirm this after a couple of false starts. For the bug to show itself, your iOS device must actually tick over from 11:59 p.m. on December 31, 2010 to 12:00 a.m. on January 1, 2011.
Click to expand...
The work around for now is to set up the alarm as a recurring event. 9to5Mac claims that the problem corrects itself after January 3rd. In the meanwhile, be aware if you use your iPhone as your alarm clock.

Article Link: iPhone Clock Bug Prevents Alarm Triggers after New Year's
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/12/31/iphone-clock-bug-prevents-alarm-triggers-after-new-years/
Last edited by a moderator:
AidenShaw

AidenShaw

macrumors P6
Feb 8, 2003
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Did Apple lay off everyone in the QA (Quality Assurance) group?

It seems so....

Maybe you could give them a pass for messing up daylight savings time - but surely someone at Apple should have known that 1 January was coming!
 
GFLPraxis

GFLPraxis

macrumors 604
Mar 17, 2004
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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A306 Safari/6531.22.7)

Wow! That was close; I would've been late for work tomorrow 0_o

(yes, I work Saturday)
Thanks Arn!
 
R

rlmccormick

macrumors regular
Jun 7, 2008
120
5
It's difficult to understand how a company as large as Apple, with all their test resources, can release software with such a non-subtle defect. It's even more difficult to understand why they have not patched this by now.
 
Full of Win

Full of Win

macrumors 68030
Nov 22, 2007
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Perhaps if Apple did a little less patrolling of apps for small infractions (Eg using volume buttons to take pictures) and more testing of the OS, then they might not have lost the mobile space to Android.
 
T

tkatz

macrumors 6502
Dec 14, 2009
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AidenShaw

AidenShaw

macrumors P6
Feb 8, 2003
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The Peninsula
tkatz said:
No platform is perfect. Bugs exist. Deal with it.
Click to expand...

Yes - but some scenarios can be predicted (for example, 31 December year X changing to 1 January year X+1).

It's pretty sloppy engineering to make bugs like that, and inexcusable QA to ship it with the bug.

Somewhere I saw a JPEG with a picture of a tombstone with "It just works" chiseled into it....
 
autrefois

autrefois

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Oct 22, 2003
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The Y2K11 bug!

Here's to hoping they can have the problem fixed before 2012.

Having one major clock bug in this day and age is sloppy. Having two is simply unimaginably negligent. Come on, Apple, you're doing so well overall on the big picture, but you have to catch the basic things like this to avoid frustration from your users and ridicule from the tech world and the press.

What might save them from complete embarrassment might be that this hopefully won't affect a lot of people: a lot fewer people have to work on New Year's Day than did the Sunday for the daylight savings/standard time bug. Media outlets aren't going to be doing much real reporting tonight or tomorrow, so this will probably just get buried.

(Kudos to Macrumors btw for posting this on New Year's Eve night; that's dedication.)
 
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Merkuryy

Merkuryy

macrumors regular
Jun 10, 2007
175
0
Shanghai, China
It's true, I set the alarm to 8:15 in the morning to review my notes for next week exam, but the alarm didn't work and I continued to sleep until 11:00, Arghhhhhhhhh,

Can I call AAPL for some cash refund?:rolleyes:
 
T

tkatz

macrumors 6502
Dec 14, 2009
258
208
AidenShaw said:
Yes - but some scenarios can be predicted (for example, 31 December year X changing to 1 January year X+1).

It's pretty sloppy engineering to make bugs like that, and inexcusable QA to ship it with the bug.

Somewhere I saw a JPEG with a picture of a tombstone with "It just works" chiseled into it....
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'll admit its a pretty lame bug, one that should have easily been found (or not introduced at all). I realized I probably shouldn't have included that last line of my comment after I sent it. I was more trying to question the previous posters suggestion of android vs ios ..
 
A

alpa

macrumors newbie
Jun 13, 2007
7
3
I was late for an appointment because of this. Now I know why.

Both me and my g/f has iPhone. And we both set an alarm 'just to be safe'. And both of them didn't go off.
 
Dr McKay

Dr McKay

macrumors 68040
Aug 11, 2010
3,430
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Kirkland
Close call averted, now I can set it for 11:59, then get up, wait for it to get to 00:01, and then set my alarm.

Im assuming this will work?
 
Slix

Slix

macrumors 65816
Mar 24, 2010
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1,989
I don't use recurring alarms. I hope people don't have problems getting up.
 
SoGood

SoGood

macrumors 6502
Apr 9, 2003
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Which script kiddie did AAPL allocate to write this Clock.app in iOS 4.x? After one major error in mishandling of recurring alarm function under Daylight saving in iOS 4.1.x, their fix in iOS 4.2.1 is still faulty (in another way). How much more basic can this app and feature be?

Major major fail!
 
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