Re: Oh yeah .....
Not sure how you managed that, I don't think what you claim is even possible.
I've never had a problem with iOS updates
DougS,
OK, I can understand that iOS has always worked perfectly for you. But surely you've noticed the odd headline in El Reg? Or just know that it's a computer - and they don't "just work".
Even if it's only a million-to-one chance that someone could get 3 iOS upgrade failures in a row - well million to one chances come up nine times out of ten. Or to be serious, they've now sold hundreds of millions of iOS devices, so million to one chances would be expected to happen hundreds/thousands of times per update cycle. Also if a device and its configuration cause a failure once, it's more likely to do so again.
I've had one iOS update fail, on an iPad. I'd backed it up - so all I had to do was plug it into iTunes, factory reset it and run the update again.
Also almost all the updates before about iOS 6 broke WiFi in some way. WiFi on the iPad 1 was a bit flakey, got almost fixed by the later point releases of iOS, but then got borked again when they upgraded to iOS 4 (I think), and the first few iterations of iOS 5 re-introduced some problems. I remember having to give my iPad a fixed IP address to make it reasonably reliable at staying on the network for a few months.
I don't recall seeing an iTunes backup be corrupted, but it's a file on a disk, so that's just to be expected sometimes. Another poster points out that iOS backups over-write each other, and I know people who've plugged in a problematic iDevice to get iTunes to reset it, and it's done an auto-backup on top of their previous good one and so destroyed their only backup by pisspoor software design. They should at least be rotating backup files.
Finally I had a friend on a 3GS who wanted to upgrade to a later iPhone. And I was unable to back his phone up - because he'd never done it, and iTunes got into some weird cycle of trying to sync/backup and couldn't do either as it hadn't been connected for so long. Which is pretty shit given they wrote/approved all the software and designed the hardware. Because when Apple stuff doesn't 'just work' they don't give you much in the way of tools or help to try and get it going again.