Smart device ownership is on the up, and many loyal Apple customers now own multiple devices made by the company. If you have an Apple Mac, chances are you might also have an Apple Watch. And if you live in the UK, chances are even better that you will ask it to load information about the weather.
Now here comes the problem: the latest Apple Watch has a bug that causes it to crash when you do this. If you ask Siri a question such as ‘What’s the weather in London?’ or ‘Is it raining?’ it crashes unceremoniously.
Complaints about the issue started surfacing on Saturday. The bug affects both GPS and LTE Apple Watch Series 3 models and also old watchOS 4.1 models in Europe, Canada and the U.S.
It’s unclear what causes the problem, but the weather app itself doesn’t have an issue. Unfortunately, resetting and/or restarting the watch doesn’t make the bug go away.
Until Friday, you could still safely ask Siri what the weather was in other parts of the country without fear of it crashing on you.
It would be interesting to see what Apple has to say about the situation. Strangely enough asking Siri what the weather would be like tomorrow or next week doesn’t activate the bug, it only happens when you ask about present weather conditions.
Some users speculate that it might be related to the daylight savings time change in Canada and the United States yesterday.
A writer for MacRumors thinks he has it all figured out – and that the bug is indeed related to the Daylight Savings Time switch. If one asks about the weather in a region which doesn’t use DST, it works. If you ask it about the weather in an area that does observe daylight savings time, it crashes.
Apple should have the problem fixed fairly quickly, but until then perhaps use an alternative weather service.