“Earlier this morning a rumor report stated that ‘Apple announced (internally) that they have put the final touch to the tools that will facilitate [diagnostics of iOS devices remotely],” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple.
“That’s interesting, considering that an Apple patent application that was just published last week introduces this diagnostic process in great detail,” Purcher reports. “If you want to know more of the real details, this is the report to read.”
Purcher reports, “According to Apple, the new diagnosing application that will reside on future Apple devices will be ingeniously tied into iTunes where you now get updates and so forth. It’ll be an easy way to get simple device problems fixed without having to visit a Genius at the Apple Store. Now that’s a great idea.”
Much more in the full article, including Apple’s patent application illustrations, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “ORevang” for the heads up.]
I had my iPhone die on me once. I was shocked because it inadvertently shut down after a call I took coming in from a client. I usually use a Bluetooth headset but on that day I had forgotten to bring it with me and used the white headphones supplied by Apple to take the call. I used a friend’s phone to call AppleCare and found that a simple forced reboot solved the problem. The iPhone’s OS has been reduced to its most simplistic form that any problems can potentially be solved through a reboot.
I had a problem with my lock screen not showing album art when a song was playing. Solution? Restart.
Air France flight 447 falling out of the sky at 11000ft/min, computers controlling the plane have gone haywire, and in 3 minutes, everyone dies. Solution? Restart. In a few minutes, the system will boot back up. Oh wait…
The Air France problem was not caused by malfunctioning computers so even if you had an online diagnostics tool available for the pilots to troubleshoot, the plane would have still fallen out of the sky. The problem was caused by frozen pitot tubes manufactured by Thales that gave inaccurate readings of actual airspeed. The plane was flying through a storm at night so the pilots couldn’t go VFR in an attempt to save the plane and relied instead on instrumentation that gave the wrong readings which the flight computer could not interpret. Also the autopilot was disengaged to implement manual flight control. The nose angle of attack was up instead of down to regain from a stall so I don’t know what could have been done with the flight computers.
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Air France was caused by malfunctioning hardware as you correctly point out, which the onboard control systems could not interpret correctly, and which confused the pilots as to the actual state of the airplane. We’ve become used to restarting electronic things that aren’t working right rather than solving the root cause. That leads to situations where operators don’t really know what to do anymore when things go wrong.
I’m convinced that if AF 447 had been a 70s era 747, the pilots would have recovered, malfunctioning pitot tubes or not.
Totally incorrect in my view. The Airbus A330 cruise speed is 880 km/hr at 30,000ft. Airflow over the wings to maintain aerodynamic lift is equal to the cruise speed. The stall speed is 170 knots at 0% angle of attack. When an incorrect speed indication is given the absence or presence of computers is redundant.
I thought there was a PBS Nova episode where they hypothesized all of that, the Pitot tube freezing, the loss of autopilot, etc. that eventually turned out to be the case, and that they showed there’s a standard nose up attitude, and throttle position, to put the plane in, to prevent aero stall.
No, the recovery attitude for getting out of a stall is nose down. The problem is that pilots have to trained to recover from stalls, because their basic instinct is to go nose up to keep from getting too low. The pitot tubes were indicating a speed that made them think that nose up was correct, when in fact, they were actually approaching stall speed, which would have required a nose down attitude to regain speed.
The more I think about it, I’m sure it was a Frontline episode and not Nova.
Ballmer’s left nut:
Wednesday, August 24, 2011 – 11:59 pm
So I take it that Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple to take up the reins of running things back in Syria as its next dictator after Assad.
Samsung will claim that since Geordi LaForge in Star Trek TNG would run 3rd-level diagnostics on various things, this concept falls under “prior art.”
+∞
Nice. The real news scoop on this story. Working with iTunes is so natural that you wonder why this never surfaced before. Let’s hope that this idea comes true.
Thanks for the straight news on this. That rumor is a little iffy and the report U link 2 handles the details better. WTF is Somebody’s Left Nut yapping about?
The speculative images of the iPhone 5 look about what I would anticipate – a slightly larger display (~4″) filling more of the front face with compressed forehead and chin areas to reduce overall dimensions. This would be a classic Apple incremental revision – the same process that was used for the iMac. Inside the iPhone 4 I expect the A5 CPU with improved graphics and, hopefully, improved battery life. I would also expect improved antenna performance and voice quality. I am hopeful that the iPhone 5 will be a true “world phone” – integrated chipset combining GSM and CDMA. I am not sure about memory – Apple has been holding pretty steady at 16GB and 32 GB for a while. If Apple wants to maintain or even decrease the price point for the iPhone 5, then I am not hopeful of a 64GB option. Besides, Apple seems to be putting more emphasis on the cloud, thereby mitigating the need for huge amounts of local storage.
I’m betting that the iPhone 5 will be a solid upgrade – a bit more compact and better performing all around. Some people will seize the lack of a radical change in the iPhone as an opportunity to predict the imminent demise of Apple. And they will be wrong. If the iPhone 5 is a true “world phone,” then Apple will sell 100M or more in 12 months. If not, then Apple will reach that figure through iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 sales combined.