iOS 10 update bricking iPhones and iPads for some users | Hacker News Reader

iOS 10 update bricking iPhones and iPads for some users

9to5mac.com

> To restore, affected users must then plug their devices into iTunes on Mac or PC to restore the device.

Bricking ain't what it used to be. Am I wrong in thinking that "bricking" means to render a piece of hardware permanently unusable for purposes other than paperweight?

No, you're right. But writing an article saying "iOS 10 update bricking iPhones" gets a lot more clicks than "iOS 10 update fails for some people", so pretty much all of the news sites have started calling it "bricking" if it requires restoring with iTunes.

Language changes and is fluid. You are witnessing a change from one common vernacular to another. Bricked = made useless, some people could probably figure out how to fix it.

This personally happened to me on my iPhone 6S. Assuming you do not have a backup of your phone you're basically screwed when you get it restored with DFU mode.

It's so easy to back up nowadays, if you don't have a backup of your iPhone when you install a major OS update, what are you even thinking?

Hello, I would like to introduce you to the average user who doesn't understand backups.

You don't need to understand backups, you just need to follow the prompts to set up iCloud and turn on backups, at which point it all happens seamlessly without you worrying about it.

All I ever saw was "This iPhone cannot be backed up because there is not enough storage".

and that's the thing. i just recently had to deal with an iphone owner who had backups enabled. but his 6 gb of photos just don't fit on the standard 5gb free icloud storage. ppl just don't want to pay for backup space. now imagine ppl with 256gb phones. they are supposed to pump even more ridiculous amounts of money into tim's ass just for storage.

don't get me wrong. in general i think apple's prices are justified. but icloud storage with ppl having backup enabled by default ist just one giant rip-off.

I think it is less about paying than understanding what it is actually doing with your files. I know a few reasonably intelligent people who could not tell you what their paid iCloud is

Apple did create a nice little automatic revenue generator. It forces you to pay apple, disabled backups (with scary delete messages), or trying to navigate the backup interface to cull things to stay withing the 5 gb limit.

Unless iCloud is being stupid and your paltry couple-hundred megabyte phone won't back up to 5GB free storage. No info other than a "backup failed" message. Or a phone backup mysteriously decides to make a 2nd copy and there are no tools to delete the first.

Both of these things have happened to me. I'll pay for iCloud backup when the tooling improves, not before.

What do you mean, no tools to delete the first? There certainly are tools to cull stuff from your backups. The simplest way is to open the iCloud preference pane on OS X, and click "Manage". It then gives you a comprehensive list of everything in iCloud, including all backups. You can also do this on your iPhone by going to iCloud preferences, tapping Storage, and tapping Manage Storage. IIRC, the dialog about having no space even offers a button to manage your storage (though I haven't seen it in a while so I can't confirm that).

Yep, and after doing all of that I still couldn't delete the backup. I tried deleting it from the iPhone iCloud UI as well as the iCloud settings UI on the Mac. Neither option actually deleted the backup. For giggles I tried to dig around in the iCloud drive app but that doesn't expose anything. The Web UI is equally useless. It would be nice to have a button that just "resets all iCloud storage" but that doesn't exist either.

I did find a workaround. Back up phone manually (in iTunes), wipe phone, restore the (months old) iCloud backup. I was able to delete the "newer" iCloud backup after that. I then restored my backup from the computer and the iCloud backup mysteriously started working again (registered as a single backup for my phone instead of two). This was all over a year ago, so maybe they fixed it since then.

The other phone on another account still won't back up to iCloud. The backup size is a fraction of the "free space" on that iCloud account and the error message is still the cryptic "failed to back up" message.

Set up iCloud and back up the 200+gigs on my phone?

Possibly via LTE?

That's a very customer hostile attitude to have. Even iCloud can run out of space / backing up over mobile data might be prohibitive to some.

Backups go over wifi, not mobile data, and iOS warns you if it's unable to backup (and you can always back up to iTunes if you don't want to add more space). Major OS upgrades are always a little risky no matter the platform, upgrading without having an up-to-date backup is generally a bad idea. In fact, just using an iPhone that has critical data on it without a backup is a bad idea, because you can always break your phone.

seeing enough reliable reports of this to believe it's at least a somewhat widespread issue:

https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/775748665226895360 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/775751273299619841

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