Xconomy has been around for four years now (our birthday was June 27) and I used the same white plastic MacBook that whole time. It was a great little machine—but despite a memory upgrade, two battery transplants, and a new keyboard (I’m pretty hard on keyboards), it just wasn’t pulling its weight anymore. The OS was crashing daily, and important programs like Final Cut Pro wouldn’t run at all. So I upgraded last week to a beautiful new 13-inch MacBook Pro. I love the new machine, and I’m looking forward to trying Lion, the newest version of the Mac operating system, which could be released as soon as next week.
Unfortunately, this week I’ve been living in Apple hell, as I’ve struggled to sync the new MacBook with my other Apple devices—an iPhone 4 and an iPad 2. It’s been like bringing a new baby home to a house where there are already a couple of toddlers: they’ve been jealous and uncooperative every step of the way. I still don’t have my contacts, calendars, photos, and videos properly synced. In fact, somehow every device now has two copies of every appointment in my datebook. I had to spend an hour rebuilding all the app folders on my iPad after the new Mac scrambled and/or deleted most of them. And don’t even get me started on the photos and videos.
I blame it all on iTunes, which is the least appealing product Apple builds. (Well, MobileMe might have been worse, but Apple recently killed it.) It’s supposed to be the traffic cop in the Apple village, making sure that all of your songs, apps, photos, contacts, appointments, etc., get sent from your Mac or PC to the right personal devices. But the program has come under increasing strain of late, as Apple has introduced new gadgets that are themselves powerful multimedia computers. I now think of iTunes as Apple’s equivalent of the space shuttle—an aging workhorse that should have been put out to pasture years ago.
Steve Jobs himself put it perfectly during his keynote presentation at last month’s World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco. The concept of synchronization has “broken down in the last few years,” Jobs said. Why? “Because the devices have changed. They now all have music, they now all have photos, they now all have video. I buy a song on my iPhone and I want to get that to my other devices—I have to sync my iPhone to my Mac and then sync my other devices to that Mac. But now they’ve deposited photos on the Mac, and I have to sync those, too. Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy.” Which is the same thing as saying that iTunes is driving us crazy.
I might have avoided my week of torture if only I’d been able to wait to upgrade to the new MacBook until this fall. That’s when Apple says it will introduce iCloud, a new system that will supposedly take over many of the functions of iTunes by copying all of your appointments, contacts, photos, videos, music, and app data to Apple’s data centers, then wirelessly and automatically syncing this data across all of your Apple devices.
If iCloud does everything Apple says it will do, it’s the beginning of the end of iTunes. (Developers already have access to a beta version of iCloud, but under an agreement that prohibits them from talking about it, so all we have to go on for now is what Apple presented at WWDC.) It’ll work like this: when you create a new appointment in iCal, the data will be wirelessly uploaded to Apple’s data centers, then wirelessly pushed back down to any other device registered to your Apple ID. The same goes for contacts and mail messages. In fact, Apple is reworking all of its major apps to work with iCloud. Books that you buy using iBooks on your iPad will automatically show up on your iPhone; videos and photos will go into a
