Experiencing some small scale analogs to this is what taught me to really appreciate the sort of simple, manual rigor that I often see from (much) older engineers.
That's not to say that such things weren't done here - who knows. It's more a thought on what I sometimes perceive to be over dependence / confidence in automated testing.
Now...
Is there a term for the sort of "If X was Y then..." conjecture we have dotting this thread?
Here, in relation to Apple it's "If Steve Jobs was alive...". In boxing it was "If Cus D'Amato was alive..."
I'm guessing the fact that they've seriously messed up people's phones means they will have to have a fix for this within hours. If you can I would suggest waiting.
I have a very conservative rule: No updates for 60 to 120 days. This applies to PC, Mac, phones, tablets, routers, embedded devices, appliances, firmware in general. This has served me well for quite some time. I fully appreciate the time and effort put forth by those who have the time to deal wih the range of inevitable "oh shit's" that almost invariably come with every software release. Not something I have time for or interest in any more.
The only times I have violated this rule was when somthing was already so broken that a new version would still be considered an improvement even with warts.
60-120 days? Your equipment will all be fully compromised by then. I can understand not updating for feature/bug fix updates, but for security updates, you should be patching as soon as possible.
Did you actually read my entire post? What did I say about breaking this rule?
Also, there's a huge, HUGE, difference between critical well-vetted security updates and a whole host of other updates that have no material value and can potentially cost you a bundle.
I'll give you an even more extreme example: Some of our engineering workstations are still running Vista. Why? Because upgrading to 7 or 8 offers nothing of value and will trigger a few weeks of upgrading major applications and software dependencies. We will finally be forced to make the update this year because Solidwork, Solidworks FEA Simulation, the associated CAM and other software require 7 as a minimum. We are far more likely to build new machines from scratch than to upgrade the existing machines. Part of the reasoning is backup during the transition.
Has this release been pulled? It's not available in the iOS dev center and the one device I tried updating (before seeing this message) has been downloading it forever (well, 45 min so far).
From the post: "Approximately 80 minutes after releasing the update, Apple appears to have removed it from its servers. Verification steps at the start of the update process failed, and now devices running iOS 8.0 display the “Your software is up to date” phrasing that suggests iOS 8.0.1 never happened."
Just happened to a friend, she can't install the update she had downloaded.
Problem is, if you were quick on the draw and updated as soon as it came out, there's no ipsw for the iPhone 6/+ on the dev center. Though the solution is to restore to last known good, LKG is not available through the usual channels.
Yeah, made that same discovery. I'm going to guess that Apple ops has a "big red button" to pull a release with problems, and that doesn't discriminate between distribution methods. Unfortunate, but makes sense until they can fully triage the problem.
My heart goes out to those unknown folks at Apple who are now having a really bad day. I doubt we'll get it, but I'd love to read a post-mortem of this event. I suspect it'd be educational, as I have a hard time imagining how an org like Apple could ship a release this obviously broken.
Caveat: I have not tested these myself, nor has anyone on my team. We are holding off until we deem it necessary to get the devices working again (an enthusiastic tester who was quick on the draw this morning managed to hose our only two iPhone 6 devices.)
FYI, this is/was a problem affecting the OTA release for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. iOS 8.0.1 was in the dev center, but was pulled along with the OTA release.
Though I've pointed out before that I don't think formal testing is a big part of Apple culture, I'm at a loss to come up with how this passed the most basic smoke testing. Or to flip it around, what random variable wasn't accounted for that allowed the devices in the test matrix to pass? Sure, it seems obvious that Apple just didn't test it. But c'mon, we know that can't be true. They must have loaded on some iPhone 6s. So what's the missing piece?
The update works fine if updated via iTunes. Only OTA updates are broken. Maybe they didn't test the OTA update process? It sounds absurd but it's the only viable option in my mind.
It's surprising to me that those would even differ in the first place. You'd think that you'd have a single deliverable which is delivered and signed, and the installer does the same thing regardless of where it gets the package. What makes OTA different from iTunes?
The obvious one would be carriers, especially since the error affects the phone part.
I have a hard time imagining a "basic smoke test" when it comes to a phone that has to actually try to connect to an external network, different depending on locations and contracts.
I agree, carriers might be the likely candidate. As for a smoke test, I'm seeing reports from users on US carriers. If it were "phones break on some obscure carrier in China", okay, fine. But when it appears to be breaking on carriers that are available to the testing labs right there in Cupertino, meh, it's got to be at least one other thing.
As another commenter said, I'd love to see a post morteum strictly in the interests of "don't let this happen to you". Sadly, we're unlikely to ever see it.
AFAIK the issue only affected OTA updates. I suspect that the vast majority of testing occurred without using OTA. I wouldn't be surprised if they are a bit more aggressive about testing OTA updates too after this.
So the root cause of this is similar to that of the broken Bumbeebee upgrade script [1,2]: a typo (missing quotation marks or unintended space) caused far more data than intended (a whole volume or /usr) to be rm'd.
I think they were under a lot of pressure on the HealthKit front. That was one of their big flagship iOS 8 features, they got all these app developers to integrate it, then iOS 8 shipped and they had a showstopper bug and wouldn't release any apps using HealthKit.
Mine on the other hand has been great. All throughout the betas it sucked (reboots constantly), but since the GM it's been rock solid for me. Only issue is that custom keyboards sometimes switch to the built-in keyboard and I have to result the custom one but everything else is good.
I haven't even updated my 5S as I need 5GB on a 16GB device for an OTA update. Is it even worth the update at this point? I really don't care much for HealthKit or any new messaging features.
Can you not just plug into iTunes and install it through that? I believe that's how I did it and it didn't need 5GB free then. I think there's a lot more than just messaging and HealthKit. Keyboards are a huge update. Extensions, which are already available in lots of apps, are going to make your device a lot more useful. Most of the big things were for developers so you will see the biggest things in apps, not the OS IMO. Another reason I would update is that it won't take long before a lot of devs drop iOS 7 support. There are tons of new APIs in iOS 8, coupled with the fact that it'll probably hit over 80% install base in a couple of months that it's best for the small devs to just drop older OS support. It happened with iOS 7.
No, Entirely possible (Although last time I tried that download times were 48hours+)! I was just wondering if at this point the positives outweighed the reduced battery life, and the apparent bugs. Seemed like it might not have been worth it at this point.
You also get extensions, but they require developers to create them and I haven't been very impressed yet. The new iCloud Photos will be nice (especially on a 16GB device), but that hasn't shipped yet. Continuity will be nice, once Yosemite ships, if you have a Mac.
Never said I couldn't, well except when it said it would take 48 hours to download the update the first weekend. It just became too much work to actually upgrade, for what seemed like very minor upgrades.
I feel that the iPhone 6 and 6+ launch has been an unmitigated disaster. Almost everything about the phone leaked ahead of time. Major shortage of + phones out of the gate. Keynote stream crashed. Website crashed for the first hour of sales. I personally reserved my 6+ to pick up at a store about an hour away, received an email that it would be ready (keep in mind this was 48 hours after the official launch, so some time Saturday night), drove all the way there to meet a 'reservation' line with like 20 people in it. It took 2 hours to get to the front of this line and when I did they informed me that they did not have my phone. Finally received it in the mail on Tuesday. And now this.
What a terrible position to put your customers and retail employees in.
I think the only device that can't update to iOS 8 is the iPhone 4, which is a bit long in the tooth.
I'm guessing Apple isn't going to throw a bone to people who won't update their phones. I doubt they'll help the iPhone 4 users, but that would be nice.
Someone should tell iPhone 4 paying customers that it's no longer safe to use the web.
Edit: would this disclosure be the responsibility of Apple or the wireless carrier? Apple may not have contact info for the customer, which would mean carriers worldwide need to notify customers of the risk to their personal data (e.g. financial passwords), as soon as they open a web site or an app that displays network-origin data, e.g. an email with an image.
Experiencing some small scale analogs to this is what taught me to really appreciate the sort of simple, manual rigor that I often see from (much) older engineers.
That's not to say that such things weren't done here - who knows. It's more a thought on what I sometimes perceive to be over dependence / confidence in automated testing.
Now...
Is there a term for the sort of "If X was Y then..." conjecture we have dotting this thread?
Here, in relation to Apple it's "If Steve Jobs was alive...". In boxing it was "If Cus D'Amato was alive..."