So last Wednesday I did the thing you're never supposed to do, which is install a point-release update the same day it drops, on the same phone I actually need to work. iOS 8.0.1 showed up in Settings around lunchtime, 21 megabytes, promising to fix the HealthKit bug and some keyboard extension crashes from the 8.0 launch two weeks back. I hit install, went to make a sandwich, came back to a phone with zero bars and a Touch ID sensor that just sat there blinking at me like it forgot what a thumb was.
Turns out I wasn't alone. Within about an hour Apple yanked the update entirely, which if you've ever tried to pull a live software update back off millions of phones, is not a small thing to do quietly. Except it wasn't quiet at all, because by then half of Twitter running the new iPhone 6 was posting "SOS only" screenshots. My phone sat there useless from around 12:15 to almost 1pm before I gave up waiting for a fix to just appear and plugged it into iTunes to roll back to 8.0. That process is its own special kind of miserable — download the old firmware, put the phone in recovery mode, restore, then sit through the "restoring from backup" bar for twenty-some minutes while you have no phone at all. I was on hold with a client during part of this using the office landline, which I don't think I've used un-ironically since maybe 2012.
The annoying part isn't even that the bug happened. Software has bugs, fine, that's the deal. It's that this specific bug only hit the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, meaning the exact people who'd just spent $199 or more on a brand new phone a week earlier got to watch it lose the one function a phone is supposed to have. Apple's advice at the time, if you'd already installed it, was to either restore from iTunes like I did or just wait, since a fixed version was already apparently in the pipeline. That fix, 8.0.2, landed the very next day, September 25th, and by all accounts actually worked. I put it on Thursday night and my signal's been fine since. But I'm annoyed enough that I'm now the person who waits three or four days before installing anything, which is a boring way to live when you used to be first in line for this stuff.
What's been more interesting to watch from the sidelines this week is how much else was happening at the exact same time, so this one update fiasco got buried faster than it probably deserved. There was the whole bent-iPhone-in-the-pocket story blowing up on forums the same week, and then the Bash vulnerability researchers were calling Shellshock, which is a server-side security thing most regular people will never notice but which had every sysadmin I know patching boxes all weekend instead of doing whatever they'd actually planned. Compared to either of those, a broken cellular radio on a two-week-old flagship phone is almost a footnote, and that's kind of wild when you think about it. A few years ago this alone would've been the story of the month.
Anyway. My actual, specific complaint, since I promised myself I'd stop being vague on this blog: the restore process should not require a computer. It's 2014. I own an iPhone specifically so I don't need to sit at a desktop to fix it. If Apple can push an update over the air, they should be able to pull one back over the air too, without making me dig out a USB cable I hadn't touched since setup day. I don't think that's an unreasonable ask.
I'm keeping the 6 Plus review I was drafting on hold for another week or two, partly because of this and partly because I want more than six days of real use before I say anything definitive about the size of the thing (it is, for what it's worth, enormous in a way photos don't quite capture — my jeans pocket has opinions). Update if you're still on 8.0.1, though. Don't be like me.