Apple gear swats fanboys

@ 2018/03/22
Helping increase the collective intelligence of the gene pool

The Apple Watch has a rather cool function which is designed to raise the standards of the world by having fanboys accidentally shot by police and thus removing the clinically dumb from the gene pool.

Reports are coming in from over the pond that Apple fanboys are sleeping on their watches and getting woken up by coppers with guns, which in the US is a likely cause of pointless death.

Apparently, if you use the watch as a sleep tracker and hold down the crown button, it triggers an emergency call to the police.

According to the Verge, if you scan through Twitter, you’ll find a surprising number of cases. It’s a problem for iPhones too, since the same alert can be triggered through the side button, even one of their hacks did it by accident by mistaking the power button for the volume controls.

In each case, you’ll get a blaring countdown and have three to five seconds to turn it off before your device calls 911 and texts any emergency contacts you’ve set up.

Apple calls the feature Emergency SOS, and it was part of WatchOS 4 and iOS 11. There’s a similar feature on Android too. Apparently, the company who hires programmers who can't tell the time, thought it was a wizard wheeze to allow you to call the emergency services.

All you have to do is hold down the right buttons in the correct order while standing on a leg and chanting “the death of Steve Jobs will save me from all harm”. The latter is optional but given the correct combination of buttons you have to press, some form of prayer seems to be a good option. However, the Verge has found that pressing the crown button long enough will set off the watch, which seems to be a particular danger if you wear it to sleep. If you’re running the latest iOS on an iPhone 7 or older, you trigger an SOS by tapping the side button five times - apparently a common practice among neurotic fanboys - and more recent iPhones will start the countdown just from holding the button.

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