Apple’s week has been a bit of a curate’s egg.
If you’re unfamiliar with that metaphor, it’s a Victorian joke in which a curate, a cleric on the bottom rung of the Church of England hierarchy, is invited to breakfast with the Bishop.
When the Bishop apologises that the curate seems to have been served a rotten egg (for what is an English breakfast without an egg?), the curate has an errant stab at diplomacy by replying, “Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!”
And so for Apple.
The release of iOS 9 seems to have gone rather well.
Indeed, Google must be looking with envy at third-party graphs showing iOS 9’s adoption rate, which looks to be touching 20% already.
That’s as far as Android 5, better known as Lollipop, has got since its debut in November 2014, 10 months ago!
Apple’s watchOS 2, in contrast, didn’t make it to release at all this week.
It was supposed to turn up at the same time as iOS 9, but a last-minute show-stopping bug seems to have, well, stopped the show.
Numerous media outlets are reporting the same response from Apple to say that:
We have discovered a bug in development of watchOS 2 that is taking a bit longer to fix than we expected. We will not release watchOS 2 today [2015-09-16] but will shortly.
If you’ve ever worked in software development, you’ll know the heartache that the watchOS team is feeling right now.
Especially when your colleagues over in the iOS team are probably feeling pretty pleased with themselves.
Still, when it comes to bugs, safe is better than sorry, especially with frenetically busy cybercriminals waiting on the sidelines to turn bugs into money.
This isn’t the first release-day trouble that the Apple Watch has endured.
At launch, health-tracking features were omitted, apparently over concerns about inaccuracy, as well as the thorny issue of what to do with the data that would be collected, like blood pressure and stress levels.
So, bad luck, Apple Watch fans.
You’re all going to have to wait – both of you.
TM
if only the Apple update hadn’t bricked so many devices. …(my iPad included)
Andrew Ludgate
Could you provide more details? From all reports, iOS 9 with its <2GB OTA update has been significantly more stable than moving to iOS 8.
Personally, I haven't really dealt with it, as I've been on the beta track on my devices (currently iOS 9.1b1). I had no problems with any of my iOS 9 updates through the summer months.
Paul Ducklin
I haven’t heard of any devices actually being “bricked”. (That means they are, literally, turned into paperweights and can’t be recovered at all. Even reflashing the firmware doesn’t help, or can’t be done.)
There seems to have been a scare that the process would freeze at the “slide to update” screen, but from all I have read, your device is not bricked. Apparently, just forcing the power off and rebooting the phone will solve the problem in many cases. Restoring the device via iTunes will supposedly sort you out if all else fails.
I am pretty sure you will almost certainly be able to reflash the firmware using the IPSW route I alluded to here:
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/09/17/apple-ios-9-is-out-with-a-lot-of-security-holes-patched/
In short, the “bricking” being reported is no doubt annoying, but seems to be a bit like saying your car is “written off” just because you have run out of fuel.
Andy M.
Both of you? :)