With great fanfare I’d like to report one of the bugs fixed in the latest iPod firmware update. Since, you know, no-one seems to know what they are (fourth dot point).
Back in 2003 when I first started earning money, I saved for a few months and bought the brand-spanking new 12 inch PowerBook and 3G iPod. This was the first iPod, if you recall, that introduced the touch sensitive buttons and that was actually quite small. The iPod that really gathered the momentum on Apple’s success with the product since. Before then it was a cool gadget only used by a select few. By the time the 4G iPod came around, white earbuds were popping up all over the place.
I digress. Does anyone remember the popping bug that plagued the 3G iPod initially after its release? It was fairly surreptitious but annoying once you noticed it; a faint click whenever you skipped or moved between tracks. It was sorted in relatively short order (the buzz about this bug on the internet was, as always, ridiculously over the top), but clearly the iPod firmware guys had their hands full at that stage, because they unfortunately forgot little old Adelaide when building their list of timezones. Obviously iPod owners in South Australia are a fairly niche market, all things considered. But how hard is it to get GMT+9.5 in that little list? And how could you possibly omit it in the first place?
I dutifully filed my bug and long ago forgot about it. Let’s face it; the iPod wasn’t exactly man’s best organisational friend. I certainly wasn’t using it to check up on my calendar when my phone could do the same as well as add new events.
But Apple didn’t forget about me, and a couple of days ago I received the blissful line in an emailed reply:
We believe this issue has been addressed in the latest iPod update (version 1.3).
Five years might be a long time to wait for alarms that go off at the correct time and appointments that aren’t half an hour out, but it’s nice to know that sometimes they do listen.