How silly

[simont]

It turns out my iPod wasn't defunct after all. It just needed turning back on!

Apparently, for the last three and a half years, every single time I thought I was turning it off or on, I was in fact putting it in and out of a state more akin to a laptop's ‘suspend’ function. On Monday it took it into its head, for reasons unexplained, to power itself off properly, which meant that pressing what I thought was the On button but was actually the Unsuspend button did nothing. To actually turn it on, one has to apply a Vulcan nerve pinch to two particular buttons and hold it for eight seconds, whereupon it spends a minute or so booting up before being willing to do anything.

I thought Apple were supposed to be masters of creating computing devices that a non-expert could use. If you can't even find the on switch without looking on the Internet, something is wrong!

(Unless, I suppose, any non-expert would have known to do that immediately, and I only failed to because my mind was too highly trained?)

Comments

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the ebook reader I got for Christmas last year. It claimed to have enough battery life to read War and Peace five times, but I was finding it only had enough to read one short novel once. Turned out that when I thought I was turning it off between uses, I was actually just suspending it and it was still using lots of power. The actual off function, the one you have to use in order to make the marketing claim true, is buried several levels deep in an "Advanced Settings" menu.

[simont]

That seems particularly silly because there isn't any obvious advantage to the vendor in making you use the battery up faster! If they were the only supplier of replacement (non-rechargeable) batteries, you could imagine how they might find it advantageous to suck you in with promises of long battery life and then squeeze you for every drop of juice they could make you consume. <f/x: grinding of tortured metaphors> But unless they're in league with the electricity company, that doesn't seem to work as an explanation.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

I strongly suspect that the decision to make it sleep rather than switch off was based on how long it takes to come back from sleep (and what state it retains), and was made by marketing.