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Dear Apple: What The Hell Were You Thinking?


Due to a recent incident, I decided to secure my personal electronics against loss/theft/compromise by strengthening/creating locks and passwords. The iPhone, I discovered, actually does allow you to use a better password for locking the device than the simple four-digit PIN.

However, once you enable a longer (more secure) password, the method of entering it changes in an interesting way:

The problem, if you don’t se it immediately, is kind of subtle.  For purposes of making it clearer, let me give you an example of just about any other entry screen on the device:

Do you see it now?

That little blue button on the lower right is typically the button you hit to complete your entry.

Sometimes it says “Go”, sometimes it says “Search”, but it’s always the button you hit to make the magic happen.

When you hit that button on your passcode entry, however, you get a pop up that says “Are you sure you want to call the police you jackass?”

Ok, actually it pops up a dial pad so you can hit up 911, but the effect is the same.

Your first reaction is to say “WTF?  Where did that come from?”

Your second reaction is to hit the back button, re-enter your code, hit the blue button again, and only then realize that this is the one place that blue button doesn’t perform consistently.

It’s not clear, exactly, why Apple would choose to muck with its interface only in this one instance, but there it is.

Apple should really consider making that the “OK” button to complete your passcode and put the Emergency call button somewhere else.



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Written by Michael Turk