Just upgrade both to Leopard you whinger!

Thanks for contributing to the discussion.

Do you always blame the customer when a product fails to live up to its promise? Or do you only blame the customer when it’s an Apple product?

I love Apple’s products, too. I want Apple to continue to succeed. Bad customer experience that goes unfixed is bad for the customer, but it’s also bad for the company. It’s bad for any company, but it’s particularly bad for Apple — because significantly better than average experience is mainly what they’re selling.

I reported these sync problems here because Apple doesn’t seem to pay attention to its own forums, where users report problems like this.

It’s a usability problem because sync is advertised as something that just works.

In practice, sync is buggy, and requires a certain amount of user knowledge. Apple could address the “user knowledge” problem by providing instructions, like other software and hardware companies do. Even just a page of information on its website — “do these steps in this sequence; don’t do such and such” — would go a long way.

I’ve now got sync pretty much working between my home and office, and I’m able to sync my iPhone as well, and I’m no longer losing data every time I do this.

The other thing needed to make it work is to sync only Calendars and Contacts on the Tiger machine. Nothing else!

If I let .Mac sync Keychains and Bookmarks, the dreaded “SyndicationAgent.app has been updated” loop begins, where the Mac informs me that a behind-the-scenes tool has been updated and asks if I want to allow the new version to access the same keychain items (such as passwords) as the previous version. If I say “Don’t change,” sync fails. If I say, “Change all,” sync also fails. But first, the machine freezes as all its memory gets sucked up in the futile attempt to update passwords — a process that should take almost no memory at all, and should happen in a moment.

So by memorizing sequences and turning off defaults, I’ve got sync working. But it took some doing to figure out which steps to do in what order, and it took weeks of frustration with locked-up machines to figure out which parts of sync are broken, don’t work, never worked, can’t work (at least not between operating systems), and shouldn’t even be offered as an option, let alone a default, since all they do is break your heart.

(And if I let .Mac sync mail preferences between my home and office machines, I stop being able to send mail from one or the other of those locations, since my home cable modem provider requires me to use their outgoing mail gateway even though I do not send mail from an account with them. That one’s not Apple’s fault.)

Clearly, from comments on this page, many other users have simply given up because sync didn’t work for them at all. Those are customers Apple is losing to Google. It’s not in Apple’s interest to lose customers to Google.

On its site, Apple provides sales copy about sync, and it provides a video about sync, but the video doesn’t show how to do sync — it just tells you how great sync is. It’s just a sales video. If sync isn’t working, and the only info you can find is an uninformative sales video — essentially a commercial for a product that isn’t working for you — you’re going to be frustrated. A frustrated customer is not in Apple’s interest.

Since sync is supposed to “just work,” and since it’s a huge part of what Apple is selling with its $99/year .Mac accounts (syncing is the only reason I bought a .Mac account), it’s in Apple’s interest to fix the bugs and to provide simple “getting started” instructions on its website.

I’m sorry it hurts you to hear that. Have a nice day, anyway.

However syncing calendars is – and has always been – something of a disaster. For subscribed calendars, instead of syncronising the subscription, as would be logical, the actual events are syncronised. And usernames of private calendars containing an @ symbol (ie. emails as usernames) are messed up – the @ symbol in the username gets confused with the @ used in http auth.

Like many people before me, I’m sure, I’ve reported these as a bug yet nothing is done. One gets the feeling that .Mac syncing doesn’t have any internal resources allocated.

There are always 100 people for whom everything works correctly, and some of them are always moved to tell me it works for them, and to imply that I’m somehow to blame for the obvious usability problems I’m clearly describing.

Thank you for saying this.

I’ve been quite impressed with how well and how easily Spanning Sync works. It might be worth a try since there’s a free 15 day trial.

That definitely sounds worthwhile, and I thank you for the tip. But if users need to buy a third-party product in order to get an Apple iPhone to sync with Apple’s .Mac and Apple computers, maybe it’s time for Apple to fine-tune some aspects of sync, so users of multiple Apple products have the good experience they associate with the Apple logo, instead of one frustrating experience after another.

With Spanning Sync you don’t need to export or download Google calendars — you just install Spanning Sync, match your iCal calendar names to Google calendar names and off you go! Also, with Spanning Sync I don’t see why your friend could not have just shared her calendar by adding you and you could have linked to the shared calendar with Spanning Sync.

I’ve been quite impressed with how well and how easily Spanning Sync works. It might be worth a try since there’s a free 15 day trial. Or maybe think about it after the new version comes out of beta.

Getting both systems on Leopard made things better …

Coincidentally, I was reading on Roughly Drafted last night an article about the complexities of sync challenges: Inside the iPhone: Wireless and Sync vs. Palm, WinCE

And yet, I’m surprised that it’s an Apple product is causing you grief. I’d expect this experience from the Windows machines I use all the time; Microsoft has conditioned us to expect bugginess.

Until now, I hadn’t realized how completely Apple has conditioned me to expect simplicity and ‘just plain works’-ness.

Darn. Now I have to go buy a MacBook.