Like me, Casey Newton still relies on syncing to iTunes to put music on his iPhone. And like me, he’s finding that more and more complicated:
For my system to work, iTunes has to sync. But with each passing year, the act of syncing seems to take longer than the year before. Hours pass by as my phone is “backing up,” even if I fully backed up the phone minutes before. And increasingly, sync doesn’t work at all. Sometimes I plug in my phone and iTunes doesn’t recognize it as a device. Sometimes the dreaded “unknown error” occurs. Most frequently, I get this: “iTunes cannot sync photos to the iPhone … because your Photos Library is not yet available. Please try again later.” (I am just learning that there is apparently a fix for this one.)
By themselves, each of these problems is undoubtedly fixable. Taken together, they convey the strong impression that sync is not a high priority at Apple. Even when syncing works, it often takes an unbelievable amount of time. And little wonder: there’s no profit in the perfect sync. Apple would undoubtedly prefer that I back up my entire library to the cloud and subscribe to Apple Music for $10 a month and watch all of my problems evaporate.
Yup.