Not the Apple of my eye....

I've written elsewhere here about how important my music is to me and how my iPhone's iPod function keeps me sane when I'm on the road.

It's strange then that Apple, who have such excellent products, are so shit when it comes to support and customer service.

Let me explain....

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I always used to keep my music on my laptop, so that I could listen to it at work sometimes (there's nothing like a bit of Led Zeppelin or something to help pass the time when I'm editing a very long and dull technical document).  I ended up with a library of maybe 130-odd CDs, all ripped from my home collection.  So when I got my iPhone, I simply opened an iTunes account and copied it all (sync'd it, in JobsSpeak) to the phone.  Hey presto, my music truly on the move.  Subsequently I downloaded some additional stuff from the excellent 7-Digital website and of course that ended up on the iPhone when next I sync'd it.  All cool, and I ended up with a library of nearly 150 albums.

Then a couple of months ago, the hard drive on my laptop went kaput.  The machine is now a useless lump of metal and plastic gathering dust in a drawer in my Trini apartment, until such time as I get home to Poland at Christmas when maybe I can get it fixed.  My company replaced the laptop, but of course I've had to rebuild and re-load a lot of data, and unfortunately amongst the files I had saved elsewhere My Music was conspicuous by its absence.  But hey, no problem....I'll download a new iTunes, plug the phone in and sync it back.

But no. 

I downloaded iTunes on Saturday.  It took 10 minutes.  I then spent the rest of the day trying to copy my music files back from the phone to the laptop.  It seems you can't actually do that.  I had a whole bunch of permissions to set up, to log the iPhone and link it to the computer, then to authorise the computer.....and still it doesn't work.  The clever servers at Apple HQ picked up that another copy of iTunes existed for me but was on another computer, but does not offer the possibility to transfer it to the new machine.  After trawling through about a dozen Help pages on the very nice, very sales-oriented Apple Support website, I found a document that explained how to use your iPhone to transfer a library from one iTunes account to another (for instance when you get a new computer....).  The first step was to "copy your files from the old computer to a new file blah blah blah...".  At that point, since my old computer is gathering dust in a drawer and not functioning, I gave it up as a bad job.

Time to mail the Help Desk at Apple and find out how to simply sync a file of music from my iPhone back to a new computer.  Go to Contact Us.....and get a page full of links to other Apple Help pages for a whole range of Apple products, but not a phone number or e-mail address in sight.  I tried a few of them......and ended up back where I started.

At that point I gave up completely, and uninstalled all the iTunes software.  What's the point of keeping it?  Right now I can't do anything except listen to my existing library (which is fine by me) and with luck when I get back home some nice Polish techie I know will be able to fix my old machine and with luck recover the existing library and I can copy it to my new machine and be up and running again.

But I'm not holding my breath.

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What makes me most angry about this is the way Apple are so proprietary about everything, and insist on a payment for everything.....and the prices can be quite outrageous.  The first piece of cable I had to connect the iPhone to the laptop for syncing and stuff frayed quite quickly and needed replacing.  The power connector itself was fine, I only needed the cable.  I went to my local iSpot store to buy one.....and had to buy the plug as well (even though I didn't need it) for a cost of something like PLN200 (that's nearly forty five quid for a piece of plastic covered wire a foot long and a plug I didn't want).  Ridiculous.

And why oh why is it not possible to send an e-mail to the buggers for advice?  I don't want to trawl through 150 odd web pages to find out whether or not I can sync back from the phone to a laptop.   And I certainly don't want to connect on-line to a technician somewhere, at premium rates of course, to talk me through the process (being a techie he's bound to speak Martian anyway so I won't understand what he's on about in all probability).  Why so secret, Steve?  Don't you want to hear bad stuff from your products' owners or something?

For a guy who's amassed an absolute fortune from inventing and very slickly marketting some of the best consumer electrical goods in the world, Steve Jobs and his merry men seem to have no idea about after sales support, customer relations and what have you.

All the man wants is your money.

To buy more crappy black jeans and turtle necks, no doubt