Filed under: Hardware, Bugs/Recalls, Blast From the Past
Date/time bugs throughout the years for Apple
As 30GB Zune owners deal with the sudden bricking of their systems after midnight this morning, hopefully they can take comfort in the fact they are not alone in this. Throughout the years, Apple products had their share of time & date problems.In February 2000, Newton owners began reporting that they were having issues with the Newton being rather confused about what century it was in. Some users discovered that when they entered two-digit numbers as part of birthdays and other common abbreviated dates, things got wonky. For example, if I entered my birth date as 2-28-80 on the Newton, it interpreted the number as being February 28, 2080 rather than 1980. Entries of full dates in the 1900s were also affected. Other users stated that when they tried finding 20th century dates in the Find applet of the Newton, the system actually performed the search using 21st-century dates.
Fixes included resetting the system clock back to 1999 to enter those dates before resetting it again back to 2000 and applying software patches. Sadly, it's a bug that HAL-9000 forgot to mention. Apple even reported back in 1998 that the Newton was Y2K-compliant. Of course, this won't even begin to cover the problems that Newton owners still using the product will have in 2010. If you see our own Newton-sporting Steve Sande at Macworld, be sure to tease him about it.
A Tiger bug discovered in 2005 revealed that Safari's RSS reader would list some items as being an hour ahead of when they were actually posted -- news from the future is not catastrophic, but certainly could be confusing.
Our research this morning hasn't turned up any date-related iPod or iPhone hiccups, but if you know of any examples please let us know in the comments. As for the Zune bricks, there's been no word yet from Microsoft regarding the failures, but Engadget's readers have already come up with a number of theories including blaming it on Steve Jobs, the year 2008 being one-second longer, and other conspiracy theories that are sure to come throughout the day.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
moorhuhn said 11:44AM on 12-31-2008
If you have "Photo Daily"( the lite version),
you have one photo / day.. so you can just turn the clock back/forward one for day to have one more free ;)
Reply
moorhuhn said 11:50AM on 12-31-2008
edit: for one day
Luigi193 said 11:57AM on 12-31-2008
Thats not a Zune bug, its a new years eve reminder!!! What a great feature!
Reply
Jay said 11:58AM on 12-31-2008
The Facebook for iPhone app has never been able to handle time correctly...recent statuses show up as "3 hours ago." Not really an apple issue, but on an apple device.
Reply
Matt said 12:28PM on 12-31-2008
Funny...mine reports it as "2 hours ago" then counts down...
Kevin said 12:51PM on 12-31-2008
I hate that too, it annoys the ever living crap out of me; not just because its inaccurate but that it has been posted about everywhere and no one seems to care to fix it. Plus it keeps the list completely out of order compared to the online feed update version *end of mini rant*
Karl said 12:01PM on 12-31-2008
The graphs in Leopard's Stocks Dashboard widget have been off by an hour since the switch over standard time in November.
Reply
Peter said 1:50PM on 12-31-2008
I noticed that too. So it starts an hour late and cuts off the close. Boooo
rdar://6470586
heytpn said 12:24PM on 12-31-2008
The reason they haven't had any problems yet is because IT'S STILL 2008. Barely. But when you said THIS MORNING, you mean tonight/tomorrow morning.
Reply
Megan Lavey said 12:25PM on 12-31-2008
Click through and read the article. Zunes started getting bricked at 12:01 a.m. on December 31st, aka this morning.
Jon said 12:31PM on 12-31-2008
Hopefully the bricking of the Zune (was it not a brick from Day One?) will encourage the three people who bought one (Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and Robbie Bach) to invest in a decent MP3 player.
Reply
Philip said 12:34PM on 12-31-2008
if I had to make a wild guess, I'd say that there's a line of code that performs some calculation on the day of the year, with a check to make sure that value isn't over 365. Since today is day 366 of the year, that caused it to choke.
Reply
Steve said 12:40PM on 12-31-2008
I desperately wish people would get a handle on the term "bricked". Anything that is likely to become functional again, like the Zune, is not bricked. Bricked means that the device is no longer ever going to function, as in, it is now only useful as a brick.
Reply
Tony said 1:01PM on 12-31-2008
There are multiple definitions of "bricked" in this sense. Here's one from the urban dictionary:
"Bricked refers to ANY hardware that is unable to start up due to bad software; Usually because of a bad software flash, a modification done improperly, loss of necessary files, being overheated from overclocking or overuse if the item is a lemon, a short-ciruiting, or a trojan that deletes necessary files for a few exaples. "
So, 30GB Zune's are "unable to start due to bad software" = bricked. Also, as of yet there's no fix. They're unable to start. They're dead. IF/WHEN Microsoft comes up with a fix, then maybe they can be un-bricked. Until then they're just paperweights.
brian said 1:11PM on 12-31-2008
Some pics I imported from my iPhone that were shot on 12/31/2007 came into iPhoto marked as 12/31/2008. Don't know if it was a problem with the phone (my suspicion) or iPhoto. Hey, I should shoot some today and see what happens!
Reply
Brian said 12:41AM on 1-02-2009
I had the same problem when importing photos from iPhone to iPhoto /this/ year. Photos were shot on 12/31/08 but metadata showed 12/31/09 -- 2 different iPhones. Long live leap year.
peter said 1:35PM on 12-31-2008
I wouldn't expect it's a leap-second issue, as the zune wouldn't know about it.
More likely is the fact that this is the first leap year zune will have encountered.
Reply
Josh said 2:57PM on 12-31-2008
I remember having problems when I first got my 2G iPod nano. Formatting it with HFS, whilst in a country that did dates in the dd/mm/yy format (ie everywhere minus USA) would make the iTunes sync fail. The fix was to change your mac's location to USA, or format as FAT on windows.
Reply
Allister said 4:51PM on 12-31-2008
Don't forget that Apple just "forgot" about New Zealand changing daylight saving start/end dates in 2007. It was the same year, I believe, that the US changed, so it's not like it wasn't at the front of their minds!
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=47&TopicId=16224
Reply
michelle said 5:17PM on 12-31-2008
an ipod touch won't connect to youtube if the date and/or time are incorrect, but its just a matter of making sure the time on your computer is correct when it syncs
Reply