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On my OS X Mavericks my time is always a few minutes (about 4 minutes) ahead of my iOS 7.1.2 iPhone. Both devices are set to set the date and time automatically.

On my Mac I can choose from:

  • Apple Americas/U.S. (time.apple.com.)
  • Apple Asia (time.asia.apple.com.)
  • Apple Europe (time.euro.apple.com.)

but these do not differ more than a second or so.

On my iPhone I can only choose 'Set Automatically'.

Why is there a difference between both times? And which one is 'real'?

Screenshot taken with a few seconds in between (believe me ;) osx time settings iphone time settings

CousinCocaine
  • 10,098

2 Answers2

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The iPhone does not use NTP to synchronize its clock. It uses a feature of the cellular network. I can't tell you why your Mac's clock is off that far, but I suggest you use nl.pool.ntp.org instead of time.euro.apple.com.

bot47
  • 7,742
  • Funny, using nl.pool.ntp.org will not change my time at all. This might be because my 'correction factor' is wrong. I have had issues with this because of Parallels... – CousinCocaine Jul 10 '14 at 15:45
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    Similar, but this worked: http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/119485/55028 – CousinCocaine Jul 30 '14 at 19:12
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It's possible your ntp.drift file is something insane - check /var/db/ntp.drift, delete it if necessary, and restart (kill) ntpd.

Jim Zajkowski
  • 131
  • I have no /var/db/ntp.drift on my OS X Mavericks. Strange, because I do have a /usr/sbin/ntpd -c /private/etc/ntp-restrict.conf -n -g -p /var/run/ntpd.pid -f /var/db/ntp.drift process running... And rebooting does not solve my issue, so I think killing ntpd doesn't either. – CousinCocaine Jul 10 '14 at 15:42
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    What qualifies as an insane value in this file? – Matthieu Napoli Oct 19 '18 at 19:02