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 Twitter and other social media were awash with disgruntled customers
reporting two distinct faults, with one appearing to be linked
specifically to older models of Apple iPhones and iPads.
"It is beyond inconvenient to not be able to use your phone for a
day," said student Pip Cordi as staff in the Apple store in central
Sydney looked at her phone on Friday. "I have a lot of apps that I
use for school - things like language apps and dictionaries and
that's all really important for my studies."
Another iPhone user, Zorry Coates, said she had spent three hours in
the Apple store and had been left with the option of either
returning her phone to factory settings - losing any non-backed-up
data - or waiting until Apple technicians announced an update.
"They said they were aware of the problem and their engineers were
working on it 24/7, but they couldn't tell me when - or how - I
would get a solution," Zorry said.
"I'm very annoyed because it's wasted half my day. They pride
themselves on being a company that's flawless."
Apple's headquarters in San Francisco did not respond to a request
for comment late Thursday. An Apple spokesman in Sydney said the
company had no comment.
Despite any troubles, significant numbers of iOS users had upgraded;
more than 16 percent, according to Mixpanel, a San Francisco,
California-based analytics company, as of 4 p.m. PDT (2300 GMT)
Thursday.
ERROR MESSAGE
Charlie Brown, a technology expert at Sydney-based Cybershack, said
any number of dissatisfied customers was significant in the social
media era, particularly following the troubled rollout of iOS 8.
Apple released several further updates to iOS8, but some of the bugs
were never fully fixed.
"The risk to Apple in terms of having dissatisfied customers is that
as their customer base grows, so will the number of those
dissatisfied customers," said Brown.
One group of users reported that iOS 9 upgrade would fail after
several minutes, requiring them to start the process over. Many
posted screen shots of the error message they received: "Software
Update Failed".
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That problem was likely caused by servers that were overloaded when
too many people tried to download the upgrade simultaneously, tech
analysts said.
"It's like the Black Friday thing," said Bob O'Donnell of
Technalysis Research, referring to the major U.S. shopping sale day
after Thanksgiving. "Some websites get creamed on the traffic on
Black Friday."
Other users, many of them with older devices, reported their devices
seizing up on a "swipe to upgrade" page. The latest upgrade had been
deemed by Apple as "friendly" to the older devices after the iOS 8
problems.
"Apple were saying the downloading mechanism doesn't take as much
space to download," said Sydney-based Graham McKay, an IT support
specialist.
McKay and Brown said they always advised clients to wait several
days before downloading any new upgrades from Apple, Google Inc or
Microsoft Corp to make sure any glitches had been found and ironed
out.
Metering the upgrade, or allowing users to upgrade in waves rather
than all at once, would have been a smarter approach, O'Donnell
said.
"It's a lot about setting expectations," he said.
Apple did this week delay the release of watch OS 2, its updated
operating system for the Apple Watch after it discovered a bug in
development.
(Additional reporting by Melissa Redman in SYDNEY; Editing by Alex
Richardson)
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