When it comes to time issues a lot of things get overlooked. I'm a software engineer. QA have found plenty of bugs I have missed and I appreciate the fuck out of them. I also could totally see this passing QA by accident.
I mean yeah, but at least where I work it would come up in a retrospective. Like hey we had this problem how do we make sure it doesn't happen in the future. Come up with an actionable plan. Move on. It wouldn't come up in a performance review unless it was a repetitive problem.
But makes it completely useless as a clock you might want to look at when you wake up in the middle of the night and want to know how many more hours of sleep you can have.
True but it probably is able to wake up on any movement.
Alexa has motion sensors and the only reason the dude saw this was the sneaking in the door out of range. Inside the room it probably never shows this.
Would it detect someone on the other side of the room, hidden almost entirely under covers, in the dark, only poking their head up to look at the clock?
Alexa has computer vision Camera-Based Detection and audio Ultrasound-Based Detection so probably but yeah there might be a gap there.
Computer vision in the dark usually is dampened for noise so it could miss small movements.
Ultrasound detection uses doppler so it could also miss if the person moved really, really slow.
The clock still works in that state and alarms would go off, the screen is the battery/power/processor drain so even if it was dimmed or wrong it would update on events.
But there might be a gap where if you were super still and made no sound and opened your eyes slow that it wouldn't pick it up and if the placeholder screen has a time you'd see it wrong. Then you'd move your head in disbelief it is 7:00 and it would change.
I don’t buy this excuse! This is poor programming. The screen could still have a once a minute update in sleep mode that would barely use any more power than showing the static last time before it slept! Also, I don’t think this is a battery only powered device. Yes it is still good to save power with a sleep mode, but a once a minute refresh would barely register!
Heck, my battery powered Apple Watch can manage to have the screen on full time and do a 1 hz refresh for 24 hr with its tiny battery!
It might even be that, the dude popped in on it in a short time and it looks like a kiosk style screensaver/background that has a static time just for like store display or the box. It could be bad programming or that but preserving power and heat is actually good programming when it comes to embedded.
Every screen on Apple caches the last version and when you re-open it it shows moments later. They are a bit smarter about this though for sure.
I suppose OP would know, but 7:00 exactly seems likely to be a placeholder value rather than coincidentally being the exact offset from its last updated time. Someone didn't change the variable from the placeholder in that part of the code and it went live.
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u/mashmaker86 7h ago
This sounds like a legitimate bug to me. Adhoc, but valid. No tester would allow that to pass.