Last friday a co-worker managed to snag one of the new iPhone 5s from an AT&T store and wanted to transfer everything from his old iPhone 3GS to it. He had not been syncing his 3GS to any computer, so I thought it would be a simple matter to set it up to sync with iTunes on his work computer, have it make a backup, then restore that backup onto the iPhone 5.<p>Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it should be. The sync appeared to go fine, but there were no apps or anything when restored to his iPhone 5. Going into the sync settings in iTunes offers an option to turn on app syncing, music syncing, etc, but alarmingly doing so would have completely removed the existing apps, music, etc on his 3GS.<p>Turns out that the only way to get iTunes to download the apps and other content from the 3GS was to right-click on the device in the sidebar and click "transfer purchases". I actually had to look up how to do this because that function is completely non-obvious.<p>Why is this the case? Why can't Apple be smarter and have iTunes download all information from the iPhone upon connection? My Palm m100 I had a decade ago managed this just fine - I could HotSync to a computer that I had never used before and it would dutifully sync contacts, calendar, etc, and make a full backup of the device. Also, shame on Apple for making it so easy to wipe the apps, music, etc off the phone during the process of trying to back them up. I hate to think that he might have lost everything, or been completely unsuccessful moving to his new iPhone just because of these stupid sync restrictions.
People with no technical experience using modern technology, sometimes I explain this to folks as the "Chutes and Ladders" problem.<p>You set the problem up like this, person comes to you and wants to buy lunch. You put down a "Chutes and Ladders" game (minimum age 3) and you say sure as soon as your piece wins. Now wait and watch them. If they do anything that isn't in the rules you play a loud buzzing sound and scold them.<p>The thing is that "Chutes and Ladders" is like the simplest game ever, but when you combine "I'm trying to do X" with "Your trying to force me to learn Y". A number of people's brain just freezes up. I don't know if that is like some deep psychological principle but the fact that doing "Y" is totally unrelated to trying to get "X" done its like your brain refuses to allocate any cycles at all to learning Y. What is worse people get emotional and angry because dammit they want X and before you blocked them they knew how to get it.<p>We forget that as children when things were 'new' we expected to not know how to do them. But when we are set in our ways that level of change is much less tolerable. In a lot of ways all sorts of technology is like that.<p>One strategy I've had some success with is to take people who aren't trying to do anything with the new technology yet and just explore it with them. That goal of exploring allows them to ingest new concepts, and then when they try to do something with the technology some of those 'learn the game' concepts will already be in their brain.
This is why I'm so infatuated with the concept of the Chromebook.<p>A lot of the "techie" stuff like backups and restoring that Marco describes here is solved with a Chromebook. And it uses familiar user interface paradigms that people recognise from their experience using Windows (especially now that they added the windows management system that looks a lot like Windows 7), whereas the iPad has completely new paradigms that people transitioning from a computer will find strange and foreign.<p>Many people I've introduced to iPads and Android devices have ended up not really using them because they're much more familiar with the point and click windows-based desktop system of Windows than "apps".<p>Not that the Chromebook fixes everything. But Google has done a great job identifying some important problems with the way our technology works today and is trying to get rid of those problems or make them irrelevant by providing you with a device where you really don't have to worry about hooking it up to your PC to "sync", update the system OS version, figure out the settings for something techie and confusing, or use iTunes (my God, iTunes) to do anything.<p>Can you imagine what a Chromebook-iPad hybrid device could be like, with the automatic updating of Chrome, syncing system of Chrome, familiarity of Chrome, but the polished user experience and app ecosystem of an iPad?
I recently left a job that initially gave me a iPhone 3G ~3 years ago. When I upgraded to a 4S I just transferred the settings over.<p>When I left I decided to delete my email account because why would I need it anymore. So I remove the account from the iPhone and went to eat a bagel.<p>Imagine my surprise when I come back to my phone to call my sister except iPhone tells me I only know about 8 people.<p>Apparently the iPhone tied all my contacts with the company account so when I deleted that, there went all my contacts with it.<p>No problem right, I'll just retrieve my backup from my computer from the last time I synced and I'll get my contacts back and then I'll figure out how to transfer over the contacts.<p>Except apparently when I got this phone with iCloud it turned off backups when I synced with my computer. Okay no problem, iCloud should have it right?<p>Except iCloud has been telling me that it doesn't have enough space to backup my stuff for weeks. I just assumed that meant my apps weren't getting backed up, which is fine. But apparently they don't update anything else, even if you've already backed it up (this is definitely not all Apple's fault, but iCloud is pretty confusing about its backup rules). Not sure why I couldn't retrieve my contacts from right before when I deleted them but they were no where to be found.<p>So finally I just bit the bullet and synced with an old backup and lost about 3-4 months worth of text messages. Yay.
I have to assume the genius was off script. The shop I worked at had people sign a document before authorizing anything destructive. We usually imaged the disk anyway.<p>Definitely agree with the larger point though. PCs (phones, tablets, etc) are ridiculously hard to use and unreliable even if you kinda sorta know what you're doing.
"I figured that a “Genius” would quickly figure out whether it still had iOS 4, and if so, would just update it to iOS 5 or 6 and then set up iCloud backup."<p>Wait but "Updating to iOS 5 will delete all of the apps and media... To preserve your content, apply this update on the computer where you sync apps, music, videos, and photos." [1]<p>[1] <a href="http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2011/10/ios-update-delete.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2011/...</a>
Macro comments that his grandparents don't want/shouldn't have to spend time dicking around with apple IDs. No one should have to. It's awful. Email, music sharing, itunes match, App Store, iMessage, FaceTime, iCloud, notes, and likely others. Getting an iOS device or mac to have fully functioning services usually takes me weeks to achieve (oh, that email account isn't arriving for some reason) as random things that worked just seem to stop working when peculiarities of personal account functionality are encountered. Why on earth the initial setup can't have an initial chance to enter apple I'd one, then a list of services to turn on.
And if for some reason a password reset has to happen it's just terrible trying to get all the devices in the house working again (don't lose Apple TV remote...) is hours of work, and is so bad the password changes are a killer. Please Apple, save us, I'm more than 50 years younger and I don't want this either.
One of the most user friendly additions to software, ever, is the undo button. (if you want to feel how it is to use software without, try Linux in terminal for a while ;) ). And one of the best attempts to do this on a OS scale, is Time Machine. It should be as easy as bringing up a prompt and step or scroll backwards in time. You are really just stepping between data states. If you restore a state, it will merge with current state and step forward (which of course can be undone). You can decide to restore only one app, and thereby limit impact.<p>Update, restore, "are you sure you want to do this?", "pick the right destination", etc are user unfriendly concepts, and will make people nervous. Auto-update apps, but let people undo. Make restores undoable. Change "are you really sure?" to "don't worry, you can always undo".<p>Of course, you could argue, this will waste storage space. Well, with a good diff algorithm to rely on, not really that much. And even if so, you can always merge older states together (e.g. the detail of change is mostly relevant to very recent events - a few weeks back, I only care about major things like when I deleted all my contacts and didn't realize until now).
The whole iDevice ecosystem is complicated. I've seen even tech savvy people suffer data loss or prolonged inconvenience. A lot of it is caused by bad design and buggy software, but a lot of it is also caused by Apple arrogantly throwing up intentional roadblocks.
I have a flipped perspective of this. In my experience, Apple tries to be too clever and does many unintuitive things behind the scenes so that "it just works".<p>I went through a horror scenario that scared me when I bought a new iPhone and my old pictures and videos for some reason did not sync over to the new device. I thought for a few brief moments that I lost 2 years worth of pictures and videos and that was enough to scar me permanently.<p>I now periodically back up all my pictures/videos from my iPhone and iPad to a folder in my Dropbox. Seeing all the files listed out in my folders gives me comfort, because I know there's no attempts at cleverness going haywire in the background, erasing and moving things around when I click "yes" or "no" to some popup question that I don't fully understand.<p>So I'm not sure what the right answer is. Sometimes I wish it wasn't as much magical as completely transparent about what's happening. Maybe there could be some nice UI that shows exactly what is stored, and people could somehow drag and drop data between devices?
Its possible that oversight here was on Marco's part and not the Apple Store's. If his grandfather had told an Apple Genius that "he wanted to make sure he could transfer his stuff onto a new iPad in case this one ever broke", chances are that the Genius would have known what he was talking about. Instead, Marco doesn't trust his grandfather to explain that coherently and has him write down the cryptic words "ICLOUD BACKUP". To be fair, those words don't mean much by themselves and I could see why the Genius thought he was doing the right thing.
Honestly I never trust Apple with iCloud. Still need to do backup with iTunes regularly. I wish iOS has better integration with Dropbox because I trust it. But again, if Apple takes over DB, then I would lose my trust. This guy isn't for web service except for music/app downloading.
The iPhone since its first version will only ever pair with one iTunes database on one computer. Although, yes, you can still backup your phone to any computer with iTunes, just on restore you won't be able to reinstall apps and music until you sync with the original computer. This is a political policy put in place and not any kind of limitation of iTunes Sync. I and several people have filed Radars on it over the years explaining why this was a bad policy but it always went into the black hole that is iTunes Radars saying "By Design".<p>The issue is moot now that you can back your phone up to iCloud completely avoiding the iTunes step. It's slow and could be costly if you have a lot to backup, but at least it moves things in the right direction overall.
I'm pretty good with technology compared to the average person (or at least, those whose job description does not consist of spending their whole lives in front of a computer), and even I managed to wipe out a lot of my iOS data when simply <i>switching to a new computer</i> (thankfully I had done an iCloud backup in anticipation of things going wrong and was able to restore. Still lost one app's data in the process, for some reason).<p>We definitely have a long way to go, although I think a lot of the stuff we put up with is also due to accommodating external forces like backwards compatibility, pressure from the music and movie industries, etc.
I think as time goes on, the digital divide won't be focused on inter-generational (gramps can't use the internet) issues as it is now. Instead, the focus will shift to first VS third world, and rich VS poor.<p>Generational issues will decay over time as the population becomes made up of a greater proportion of 'digital natives', but the gap between rich and poor will still exist. We should take the lessons we learn here and try to apply them there when the time comes.
While Marco has written specifically about iCloud and the iPad, what he describes is not limited to just everything Apple. My father recently turned 70 and he has a PC at home which is used for listening to music, browsing and a lot of CAD. He started using computers much before I did, but he did not grow up with them and still finds it hard to deal with GUIs. It has always baffled me as to how someone who was excellent at using the CLI can struggle so much with what is meant to be easier. I am talking about ease, not efficiency.<p>And it is not that he's not a sharp cookie anymore. He runs the household, still consults on his civil engineering projects, tinkers frequently with various things electronic/electrical, but GUIs stump him and his predicament has only gotten worse with the newer iterations of operating systems. For my generation, who grew up with the modern computing paradigms, this is unfathomable, but it is a real problem too, one with no real solution.<p>I have found my eventual solution in doing Teamviewer sessions for most problems. It is heartbreaking to make aged parents feel incompetent because they can't seem to grasp easily the same concepts we can grasp without even half a thought.
I recently had a problem with corrupt file system (<i>that's what I initially thought, but right now I think the disk is dying</i>). Anyway, what I did was re-partition my 750 HDD and installed Mountain Lion in another volume. Then, I copied "~/Music/iTunes" AND "~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync" folders from the (supposedly) corrupt ML to the new ML, and the next time I attached my iDevices to the Mac, they synced back without a problem and I didn't lose a single item. Of course, I also had iCloud sync set up before hand (and now I learned that I can use both the iCloud and manual backup to my computer, which is extremely convenient).<p>It was a little off-topic, but I just thought sharing that little story with others might be beneficial. I searched a lot before doing that but couldn't reliably verify I can move my Synced data between multiple installations, so maybe others in the same situation find it useful.
While I agree completely to Marco's post, I also want to point out, what I believe is, the underlying root of evil: "The iPad is easy" (or the X is easy).<p>Expecting that something is easy and always works is not that helpful, and to some extend removes responsability from the consumer (which is great for the consumer in the short run).<p>It doesn't help that we (techies and others) use catchy phrases such as "It's easy" to convince people to give it a try. Because, for some, it <i>will</i> be difficult.<p>When you tell older generations about something "new" (email, smartphone, tablet, whichever) and they're hesitant or slightly sceptical, it's easy to hear yourself giving the argument: "But it's easy, you just have to...".<p>Don't say "but it's easy" in cases where you should've said "but it's easy for me".<p>Should the iPad experience be better? Sure, and I'd love to see them continue to strive towards it. My point is the other end of the equation: the consumers.
Thx, I hope this get pushed up to front page. And prove my comparative theory, Apple will know they happen to be good only because their competitors are bad.<p>I think we need some rethinking into the whole mess of sync. It is not easier, even for some technically minded individuals.<p>And may be someday Apple could charge $50 or more per iDevices and have iCloud Backup as standard. No more messing around with iTunes Sync. And my friends wont cry when her iPhone has been stolen and lost all the pucs she took over the years.
I've just upgraded from an iPhone 4S to an iPhone 5 using iCloud backup. I assumed it could do everything that an iTunes based backup could do, but I was wrong. It didn't backup any of my audiobooks - so I have to buy those again, and it wiped all my Google Authenticator codes.