Apple tried to help w/iPad crashes, but it's starting all over again.

Question

I have done multiple resets, wipes, virtually everything suggested for the Safari crashes on this forum. No joy. Getting to a genius bar is physically difficult for me, so I finally contacted Apple via email and to their credit, they called me in less than 24 hours. After sharing my own rants with the first person I spoke with about the problems with ios 5, I was transferred to tech support. The tech person walked me through what I had experienced so far, and his first response was that we needed to determine if I was having a hardware or a software problem. He suggested that there might be a problem with the the original upgrade download file, so he walked me through deleting the "ipsw" file from the Library on my MacBook Pro. I did a complete wipe of my iPad 1, created a new iTunes library on my MacBook, re-downloaded the 5.0.1 update file and set up my iPad as a new iPad. I then tried things out with only the native apps installed, and used Safari for a couple of hours and everything seemed fine. I re-downloaded apps directly from the App store - I did not copy any apps from the old iTunes folder, just in case there were corrupted apps. This all happened almost 2 weeks ago and for awhile everything seemed fine. Then the crashes started up again, and have been accelerating in frequency over the past 3 days. This morning I've had two Safari crashes in one hour with nothing running in the task bar and only two tabs open in Safari. Other crashes have occurred when using the App store, email, and other functions, so it's not just Safari that's crashing. The main point that came out of all this is that IT'S NOT MY IPAD THAT'S THE PROBLEM, which tech support agreed with. I hope this info helps someone else at least determine if their iPad is functioning properly. I did finally turn on the Debug console in Safari and found out that Facebook plugins to different websites create many Safari errors. If anyone else has had experience with replacing the "ipsw" file and then doing a clean restore of their iPad, I'd like know how it worked/did not work for you.

Answer 1

I agree completely. I posted my experience in hopes of saving someone else a trip to the genius bar, and also to see if others had tried or been told to try this. I've read a lot of posts about wiping and restoring but no discussion about the original ipsw file download (sorry if I missed it elsewhere). It was clear from my discussions with Customer Service and Tech Support that Apple DOES read these discussions, so that was another factor in my posting. I did call the tech guy and leave him a message as to the latest developments -as per his request - but haven't heard back from him yet. During our original conversation he stated that he hasn't had any crashes on his iPad - good for him, but what does that mean for the rest of us? I pointed out to both reps that I've never seen it take so long to get a serious bug fix out of Apple.....all the stuff others are saying, with no really reassuring response from them that a fix is imminent. I hope each and every person experiencing this calls and calls Apple until something finally happens! The guys I dealt with were very nice, but I still have the same problems!! AND, I'm curious as to why things work o.k. for awhile after the restores, but then the crashes suddenly accelerate - this is my 4th try with the same results.