iOS Woes

Well I had been having a good day. I tidied up, made applesauce and oatmeal scones, had a couple of lovely walks by the lake and a little visit with Barbara (our neighbour across the street).

All was well until this evening, in fact, when I opened up iBooks on my iPad to see what I might start reading next and discovered that my choices were rather limited. Very limited actually. They were so limited because virtually ALL my books had been DELETED! And checking iTunes on my computer didn't help much because THEY WEREN'T THERE EITHER. (Yes I need capitals; that's you I'm yelling at, Apple.)

Near as I can figure out, it's yet another iOS 5 casualty. When I upgraded a few weeks ago, I was one of the many people who lost their music. That wasn't much of a dilemma since I only had one double cd, but for others who had hundreds of albums, thousands of songs all carefully organized, it was a catastrophe.

I'm really not happy to lose my books though. I do have everything backed up on my laptop, but how am I supposed to remember which ones I had lined up and ready to read? I lost all the books I'd read too - along with all the highlights and annotations I'd made. It's not a total disaster I suppose, but it is decidedly disappointing.

The other iOS 5 issue I have is that I can't really sync properly with my iTunes anymore. Yes I can opt for the backup and sync options and they seem to work, but if I want to choose apps to sync from my itunes list, suddenly my iPad content plummets to about 3 GB from 28 GB. That means most of my apps wouldn't be syncing and I'd be spending HOURS re-downloading (assuming I could even remember which of my hundreds of apps I'd kept on the iPad itself) and MANY MORE HOURS categorising them. I'm not willing to do that; I'll just have to settle for a few missing books and songs.

So I guess I've learned a lesson I should already have known. Never Never Never take a new update right away. Let other people be the guinea pigs who find the bugs and quirks. Guess I got caught up in the heady excitement of a big new upgrade. Really, though, there is very little of benefit to me in iOS 5 - certainly nothing that could make up for the inconveniences it has caused. Sorry Apple; this time you messed up. It didn't “just work” at all.