It Really Just Works
My iPhone has been playing silly buggers for a few days now, so I decided to bite the bullet and do a restoration on it. Having had some experience of restoring various gadgets to factory settings and the subsequent pain of getting them back how I liked them, this was something I approached with no small amount of trepidation.
Dock iPhone… it shows up in iTunes and predictably throws up an Unknown Sync Error (-39). No worry, I’ve already decided to click the “Restore” button. A single approval window appears, and I confirm my intent.
iTunes goes away and unpacks the new firmware, wipes my phone, re-flashes it and then restarts it without any input from me. I even went and played on Facebook whilst it was getting on with it. Next thing I know, the iTunes icon is merrily bopping away in my Dock and asking me if I would like to set my iPhone up as a whole new device or if it should just restore my backup.
Simply put, I restored my backup and it’s currently got all my settings (As far as I can tell) absolutely as I left them and is busy restoring all my media/contacts/email and so on. Apple wins for easy fixing of mildly broken phone, infinitely easier than fixing most other broken devices, even those with so-called ‘one-click recovery’. Even so, it worries me that people feel the need to put in a big “Fix It” button no matter how easy to use it is. Perhaps a more elegant solution would be an option tucked away in a menu, and a ‘cock-up counter’ which automatically asks you something like “Your device has failed to sync properly the past 10 times you have docked it - would you like to run an automated recovery and restoration of your backup?”
Anyway, that’s not the only good thing Apple has done with regards to updates and just working today. Earlier on Software Update bounced around my Dock and let me know that I had a shiny new update. A firmware update!
My last firmware update was a quite slick affair which updated my keyboard with a couple of minor fixes and improved responsiveness when waking from sleep, or something similar. However this was an EFI firmware update, an altogether more substantial beast. For those who don’t know, EFI is a slightly newer and more useful alternative to the BIOS. If you don’t get the acronyms, EFI or BIOS are the underpinnings of most forms of computer, containing all the stuff which lets the computer get from being turned on to starting an operating system.
My only experience of re-flashing BIOS firmware on PCs was an interesting one, relying on a couple of floppy-disks, removing a case cover, setting a DIP switch and removing the backup battery. To make it worse, I had to download the firmware myself, put it on a floppy and install a floppy drive onto the motherboard before I could do anything. This is after checking for an update because I thought it might fix some graphics issues I was having, not because I knew it was there.
OS X, on the other hand, was slick. Software Update downloaded the firmware, and then I clicked “Install”. It went away and did some magic (I presume writing hard-disk locations to the PRAM or some other such gimmick which let the patch apply itself), then asked me to shut-down my Mac, and power it on by holding the button until the sleep indicator flashed. This I did, my sleep indicator did flash, and after a loud and rather shocking beep I got the Apple logo with a status bar. When the bar was full, my machine rebooted itself.
So, updating the core firmware on a Mac is a three-button process. “Install” - “Shut Down” - Power. I gave up counting the PC steps after #17 - “Reverse floppy cable because some idiot decided not to make it keyed and you put it in upside down”.
I love my Mac.
Tags: Apple, backup, EFI, firmware, iPhone, iTunes, Mac, software, Software Update, update