iPhone 4S: Siri Breaks Down, Frustrations Mount - Should You Care?
On Thursday, Nov. 3, the iPhone 4S’s revolutionary voice-recognition personal assistant Siri went missing across the U.S.
According to reports which first surfaced on Twitter, even when connected to wi-fi or 3G, when asked questions, Siri answered only with: "Sorry, I'm having trouble connecting to the network" and could not fulfill wishes.
The problem did not seem to be carrier-related.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Apple blamed the outage on too many data requests for their servers to process, causing them to overload and crash.
Some say that the Apple servers may not have been prepared for the influx of new Sprint users.
Unlike other locally-stored apps that don’t need an internet connection to work, Siri needs to connect to Apple’s cloud server, even for basic functions like adding a contact, editing a calendar, or managing a playlist.
The muscular 4S uses the faster A5 processor and boasts a beefier 512MB of Samsung DDR2 RAM, and many argue the phone should easily perform these functions itself.
"Granted, Siri is still a beta product--and this is what happens to beta product-- but when Apple promotes Siri as one of the best and OMG-gotta-have-it new features of its latest device through its cloying new TV ads, it's worth noticing when the service doesn't quite deliver as promised," said columnist Sarah Perez at TechCrunch.
International users have experienced the most agitation with Siri. Reportedly, Apple engineers only tested the iPhone 4S prototypes at their headquarters in Cupertino, California, unaware that Siri's location features would not work outside the U.S.
This is not the first problem to plague the iPhone 4S.
The first faux-pas, nicknamed “Battery-Gate”, caused the battery life to drain rapidly. The glitch was attributed to the buff iOS 5 firmware (nearly a gigabyte in size), and Location Services enabled for too many unused apps. Also, some users who set a passcode lock could reportedly bypass it by simply holding down the Home button to activate Siri. The breach allowing potential thieves and prying eyes access to the phone.
A widespread outage, just weeks after Apple’s first major push into cloud services, could potentially damage the tech giant’s standing in the arms race for cloud dominancy. Many iPhone 4S users still report intermittent or total Siri blackouts, even days later.
Some level-headed users tried to calm the widespread panic and offer perspective.
“Is it really that big of a deal? Apple branded Siri 'beta’ for a reason” said user Robert Arace. “Outages are going to occur.”
And others argued maybe the world just isn’t ready for Siri yet.
“This calls into question, yet again, the extent to which we can depend on any form of cloud-based services,” said user Wes Gordon on Ars Technica. “Everyone can see the potential benefits (and is keen to be a leader in the field) but the infrastructure just doesn't seem to be there yet.”
