Be Excellent To Each Other

We are going on holiday next week, so my wife asked me to put some music on her IPhone.

So I hook it up to a Mac running ITunes, using a profiled I created separately called” IPhone”

ITunes finds an update to IOS 5.1 which I tell it to install, once it’s all finished it starts asking me for a password, ro restore the backup, both of use were stumped here.

So I call Apple and get out through to an “expert” he tries to tell me that the issue is down to an MS Exchange encryption setting, which I buy into as my wife enrolled her IPhone into a system at work and she can read her work email on it.

So then I look into breaking the encryption and find a tool by Elcomsoft, by this time I’ve had to move the ITunes backups to Windows to use the tool, oddly enough the tool reports no encryption on any of the backups.

So back to Apple support, the next expert tries to tell me he has never has any reported issues like this, so I point him to the 12 page thread on Apples support forum and he changes his tune. So now we try hooking the phone to a Windows install of ITunes and moving the backup from the Mac.

First observation, Windows ITunes is much fucking easier and simpler to use than the Mac one! Just right click on the device and click restore from backup

After a restore it then transpires that the backup is corrupt and no use, so back to square one.

The support guy confirms what I already found out on the internet that there is a bug with IOS 5.1 that sometimes encrypts the backup with a random password, it could be a phone unlock one, a password that an app in the backup used or even 0000 or nothing at all have worked!

He also tells me that sometimes the backup is no good as has happened in my case

So yes my wife should have backed up, this issue has shown me how shit she is with emails, passwords and what they all do. The damage here is minor, she will have to do some phone security with some bank accounts and message all her mates on Facebook. She also needs to get her shit together and have a decent personal online setup with PC, email etc. Her IPhone now goes to I Cloud

Thing that pisses me off the most is that this issue has been known about since October 2011, fucking Apple wankers

Wait, what? Where did this come from?

While I agree that it's a shit bug, you were updating to 5.1, which was released in March. Assuming fixing the bug needs a device-side update which is in 5.1, that means the bug was open from October to March, which isn't even close to a long time in the software world.

Stop holding it wrong.

She kept all her bank login info on "notes" and all her contacts were on the IPone only so I guess she will have to do a mass email to all her mates saying "send me your details"

As she has no idea of how to get into our savings account online now, she will have to call the bank and do some security questions before they give her the details.

Link?

Link for this too?

That's a bloody awful bug. I haven't heard of it before.

The solution is probably to stop buying products that force you to use iTunes.

Link to the thread https://discussions.apple.com/thread/33 ... 0&tstart=0

All I got from the phone support was a verbal confirmation (on the 2nd call)

I agree, the whole point behind this mess was I was putting music on her phone so I can use her touch on holiday

The touch had 400 songs on it and I hooked it up to my PC and selected backup, it wiped the whole device

Not an issue as all the music is on my NAS, but I don't understand why ITunes can't look at the device and take whats on it as the master copy, or at least allow you that option

iTunes is a fucking travesty and there's not a chance in hell I'll ever let it near any of my devices again. Not for a single thing.

When I had an IPod Video and older I used this

http://www.ephpod.com/

Nice and fast and let you batch tag the music as well

Won't work with the newer models and most of the other apps I've found are as bad as Itunes.

Get an Android phone.

I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

You'd rather have no backup at all than one with a (uncommon) bug in one version in 5 years?

*crosses fingers for another pointless polarised debate*

MR CAN'T FIND THE ROLLEYES DIMLIE FACE

Android phones have been backing up natively (without the need for PC software, obv) for about a year. Keep up

No, I'd rather make a joke riffing on the 'get an Xbox' meme. You tit.

Media Monkey still works to shovel music on and off an iPhone doesn't it? Since 5.0 there is theoretically no need to use iTunes at all, ever, if you run iCloud for backups. However, you can't use Match without it.

I use Match, and I have found that it has speeded up the way I use itunes. Now I only have to pop a cd in or copy music over. Then Match allows me to download what I want to my phone.

Infact now we have moved to one itunes (mine) it is a lot easier.

It helps not using it in Windows as well. It's still not the greatest piece of software ever, but it works so much better in OS X.

Yes windows and a nas. Not a great combination.

That asterisk offends me.

Yeah he's a cunt isn't he?
\


Malc

Has there ever been any rumblings about Apple sorting the iTunes client out at all? It seems to be universally loathed and a real weak point in their ecosystem in general which they could do with looking into. Obviously the iCloud stuff will go some way to allowing people to walk away from it but you're still tied to it for file transfers and whatnot so it's never going to go away entirely presumably. Or does the iCloud stuff alleviate so much of the pain that it's no longer really an issue?

For Windows? Yeah right.

I have iTunes on OSX now and I can't really see a difference. What's the difference?

A bit of the latter. iCloud helps a lot. Never been any rumblings. Plenty of Apple pundits would like to see iTunes split out into lots of separated components -- Music, Movies, the Store for music, the Store for apps, and so forth. Notably, this is how iOS presents its content, which has led many to believe Apple would prefer this approach. Most people suspect Apple can't do that, however, because of the Windows client -- the theory goes that iTunes (and the Cocoa runtime it relies on) has to ship as a single blob for ease-of-install purposes.

It breaks, slows down, and generally goes weird a hell of a lot less. (Not never, sadly. But less.)

They could mitigate that surely by having a single installer that installs the various sub-apps so it's still a single transaction for the user but a more convenient architecture behind the scenes.

You could even then allow users to choose which bits they want/need; while obviously prompting them to install the extra bits if they do anything that requires them. MS Office does this and it's nice to not have to install shit you don't care about.

Or they could just hire a .NET developer to write a Windows version, rather than relying on a clumsy ported runtime. Then they could include 360 pad controls too. What?

Apple have already split up their productivity suite, iWork. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are now available separately on the Mac App Store for £14 each. That's nicer than spending £100 on a suite, 80% of which you'll barely use.

You can buy the components of MS Office separately as well, it's just the most people are going to be installing a hooky copy of the full suite.

But then they wouldn't be able to use their popular iOS devices as a trojan horse for installing their stores for Music/Video onto people's computers who don't really want them.

If you pirate stuff you get what you deserve.*

* A better product 95% of the time, sadly

The ported runtime is an awful lot of work for two apps (iTunes and Safari), one of which no-one cares about. I suspect it's done for consistency, rather than elegance, and therefore I'd guess a truly native port would never happen.

That makes zero sense. If you have an iOS device, you already have the store where it counts. Adding iTunes store on the Windows computer doesn't make a lot of difference.

Edit - also, compared to hardware sales, the store makes tiny amounts of money for Apple. It's not as important as you think it is.

30% of every app sold to anyone with an iOS device is a tiny amount of money?

Given that the market for people who have both OSX and Windows is vanishingly small, and given that you can't even attach a device to two separate installs of iTunes, consistency in this context is utterly pointless.

Compared to hardware sales, yes.

Probably better referenced of 30% of every app etc bought through iTunes rather than through the appstore on a device, isn't a big deal.

This thread reminded me to back up my photos yesterday and so I synced to iTunes for the first time in 9 months. Jesus fucking christ. It took me 5 minutes just to remove the apps that I had previously deleted from my phone after it had curiously decided to reinstall them.

Compared to how much they make off the hardware, yes. App devs get $12 per iOS device sold: http://www.asymco.com/2012/02/19/app-de ... vice-sold/ so Apple only gets $5.

Apple is a company that makes money from selling hardware. Every line of code it writes and every server it runs for online services is only there to make its hardware stand out in a crowded market. Sure, it makes some money from the software -- no sense in leaving revenue on the table -- but it's not the focus.

Yes, that's unutterably shit. However, if you'd just unticked the apps in iTunes then resynced, it would have deleted them all in one go.

ITunes assumes that in every case there is a nice local ITunes library with everything in order, yet at the same time it allows you to add music from your local hard drive.

They also assume that everybody connects to ITunes every day, in the case of my wife’s phone she did it once as she was forced to in order to activate her phone, after that it was a phone, with apps installed on the device. (until the music request along)

There looks to be nothing in the app that looks at what you’re connecting and says “Hey I see you have a load of stuff on this device, would you like some options on what to do next?” Instead it just wipes the device with some blank library.




I would agree in part with that, the IPod touch is just an IPhone without a calling functionality, the last IPod video I had was great, it played music and nothing else, now you are faced with crap you don’t need on an MP3 player and it slows it down.

Other people love them though, my niece and nephew love all the apps and crap they can install on theirs, all I want is something that does music and nothing else.

Also, for some unknown reason, iTunes wouldn't let me delete music off my phone. I had to finish the sync, unplug, delete all through settings then download the albums that I wanted over wifi through Match. It is great that I have Match and was able to do this, but I'd gone through 2 restarts on both PC and Phone and still it wouldn't play ball.

My iPod is racist. On occasions, it won't stick an hip-hop stuff on to it, but is quite happy with country.

Errr... apart from the dialog that says "Hey I see you have a load of stuff on this device, would you like some options on what to do next?" when you plug it in you mean?

This is a bug. iCloud is the patch, and that's been live for a year now.

How does that make zero sense? Even if the majority of their profit/revenue comes from hardware, there's an element of lock in to Apple hardware if you're an iTunes customer on any desktop.

If you install iTunes because you've got an iPhone, then buy a load of TV shows from iTunes to watch on your desktop (be it running Windows of OSX), and then you decide to get a tablet, the only tablet than can (easily) play those videos is an iPad, because of the iTunes DRM.

even apple - they killed windows safari, didn't they?