Okay, so it’s
It’s about this new iPhone 6 that I bought in October. No, I like it. The phone itself is great. I've dispensed with my trusty Mophie doubler, since the battery life is pretty close to a real day now. I've been caught only once or twice longing for an outlet late in the evening. The hardware is great.
It’s the software and service that finally bothered me enough to bring it up. You may know that when you buy an iPhone, you get 60 days of Apple Care bundled in with the purchase price, enough time — in theory — to shake out any issues.
So, right away I found a couple. And started working with Apple on them.
First, the phone never quite completed the initial restore, which it was trying to do from iCloud. Somewhere along the line, over about a week, it gave up. I still didn’t have all my content. I was missing a lot of songs, and I was concerned. It especially bothered me that I was unable to import any photos from iPhoto at all. Now, iPhoto has always been a weak application in my view. I stopped trusting it long ago. It is one of the strange twists of the universe that
But the photo story was really part of a larger narrative. I have not been able to sync my iPhone with my iMac for quite some time now, which could be major, but, in fact, it’s been a while since the phone really depended on iTunes for synchronization. Perhaps the problem is that iCloud and iTunes try to coexist, each nonetheless trying surreptitiously to manage your library on its own. Now, in Apple’s defense, my iMac is a bit schizophrenic, its multiple personalities having been generated by various family members over time. But still, I had been hoping that a new phone would fix the problem. Not so.
It always seemed strange that when you plug a phone into a Mac it fires up not one, but two, programs: iTunes and iPhoto. Can you spell kludge?
Then, there were the ringtones. I couldn't seem to bring over any of my old ringtones, which were sitting in the iTunes library, but not going over to the phone.
There was also another problem. Something on the order of 15 accounts kept wanting me to sign in. I eventually figured out that they were all related to activities of my daughter and her many friends, who had been doing something unhygienic with respect to music, which, when combined with Dropbox (another grandmaster competing with iCloud and iTunes to arbitrate your content), caused iTunes to ask for this whole deck of credentials.
Finally, an annoyance, but something I could live with, all my calendar items displayed two time zones, Eastern, where I live, and Central, for no known reason.
I reported all these things to Apple via Apple Care, and very quickly I was escalated to a Level Two tech with a name and a personality, who was going to take over my case. Now, I’ll not name this person because her role in this narrative is not entirely charming.
But, anyway, this extremely friendly person, who seemed to know a lot of tricks about Apple software, begins to take me on a journey through the arcana of my machines. First, she unhooks iPhoto from the sync process, and iTunes provisionally accepts my iPhone. It still won’t sync, but I can move libraries manually. That’s good enough for me, and I move everything I want onto the phone. We try a bunch of things with the photos, but no dice. That one is left unsolved. That’s okay. Over time, I have migrated all my photo activities to Windows, where I edit them and put them in directories of my own choosing.
But here's the weird thing. After two or three go-rounds, in which we email and talk on the phone (she even calls me back at appointed times), she stops calling. I track her down a week or so later, and she says, “Yeah, I’m still waiting to hear from engineering.”
And that’s the last time I managed to talk to her.
Now, she has assured me that my incident falls under Apple Care, since it was reported within the 60 days, but I’m thinking something else is up.
Nothing gets solved from that point onward by Apple Care, but gradually bits of information and software trickle in.
For example, the ringtone issue seems to have been a general bug, and one day, after a software update, there are my ringtones. Okay, fixed. But a funny way to find out.
So, I’ve got the music that I want, and I’ve given up on photos. I can live with that. And ringtones are fixed. The multiple identity problem sort of went away when I disabled Dropbox. What’s left? The calendar time-zone glitch, which I come to discover is, again, one of those general issues that there’s no real explanation for. Apple seems to be calling this interesting bug “expected behavior,” but it’s not expected in any of the time zones in which I operate.
Maybe if I just sit tight, Apple will ship a mysterious fix in the next point release. And if it doesn’t?
I must not be holding it right.
I wish my friendly tech would call me back.
I wonder if my Apple Care incident is still open. I’ve got the case number here somewhere …
