Every time the clocks change we stick out our feelers for stories which suggest that Apple has suffered some indignity by writing code which failed to take the event into account.  Mostly Apple forgets to put in the summer time or is unable to account for people getting on a plane and having the time zone change.  It seems that every time the comedy programming team at Apple come up with new ways to show their competence. You would think that if you could get one basic thing wrong, you would learn from that mistake and never do it again but Apple keeps repeating it.

So far it has caused alarms to fail across Europe, alarms simply not working on New Year’s Day, and the incorrect time being shown in the built-in calendar app. Even an iOS 9 update a few years ago managed to disable people’s alarms, and iOS 11.1.2 crashed iPhones when they hit 12:15 AM on December 2nd last year.

Now it seems that Apple has created a watch which cannot tell the time.  The Apple Watch Series 4 owners in Australia are experiencing crashes and reboots due to a DST bug. Apple’s latest watch reportedly gets stuck in a reboot loop due to a bug in the Infograph Activity complication. Australia just moved to DST and advanced its clocks by an hour yesterday, and this appears to be causing issues with Apple’s latest Series 4 Watch.

As the watch gets stuck in a reboot loop, affected users can either wait it out until tomorrow when the bug should correct itself, or attempt to remove the complication from the Apple Watch app on the iPhone. Or they can be gravely insulted that Apple attempted to pass off this expensive piece of programming on them and demand a refund.  After all if you can't trust a watch to tell you the time what is the point of all the other functions?

The Tame Apple Press says that there is nothing to worry about as Europe moves off DST at the end of the month, and North America changes over on 4 November, so Apple has plenty of time to issue a fix for other regions.

"It’s entirely possible that the Apple Watch Series 4 might even handle the different DST (reversing an hour instead of advancing) in Europe and North America gracefully."

In other words, it is not piss poor programming you have to worry about as Apple has more time to fix it before daylight saving changes happen in civilised countries. One magazine even had the balls to claim that the problem was daylight saving and nothing to do with Apple.

It is one of those rare programming feats where not only am I certain that it is possible to get right, I have done it on a Commodore Pet - which had considerably less processing power than an Apple Watch.  I was 16, one of the worst Pascal programmers in my computer studies course. I got a B+ for that code (and a C+) for the entire year.