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An iPhone 6, (no) movies, and me

On Friday, I received my new iPhone 6, which I really like—a lot, in fact. Over the weekend, however, I discovered that my new iPhone does not like iTunes—at least not syncing my movies via iTunes.

Things started great, with the arrival of the new iPhone 6 on Friday afternoon:

From there, though, things didn't go exactly according to plan…and I documented my progress (or lack thereof) via Twitter over the weekend. Read on for the full story, as told in 140 character increments.

Time for the first massive sync—I'm going to take advantage of all 12GB. Uh oh…

Getting very frustrated now…

Plus Console spam!

Then, some progress, for reasons still unknown: Audio (and it turns out, Books) started syncing.

Bitter? Me? No, why would you suggest that?

And then, success! Or so it seemed…

Although the movies were syncing, I was really upset about how much time I'd spent on the process, so I decided to vent to the top.

As it turns out, it's not a success, but merely a temporay blip of functionality. Sigh. And just for extra fun, iTunes is resyncing songs for no apparent reason.

Time to punt it back to factory fresh…

I guess that was a great big "nope!"

Finished the letter to Tim just before midnight.

At that point, I was ready for sleep, so I tried one more restore and sync. And the next morning, I found…

And here's the link to my letter to Tim Cook.

Sadly, my iPhone 5 had also decided not to sync movies.

Can you sense the frustration level rising?

Time for the real nuclear option—remove and reinstall iTunes and its mobile sync kernel extension.

At this point, I decided to start an online chat with Apple Support, to see what they might be able to do.

Well, that escalated quickly (14 minutes).

So begins the live tweeting of my tech support call…

And we're escalating again.

Some insight into how Apple does remote tech support.

Now the engineering call, sort of and eventually.

Yes! A response from my email to Tim Cook—on a Sunday morning, no less. Needless to say, I was shocked to get a response. The engineer sent me a diagnostic file with an odd side effect, it seemed—my movies synced!?

Meanwhile, I was still talking to Apple Support. I have yet to hear back from Support as of Monday morning.

I then had to go out for a few hours and, you know, actually get some stuff done. When I got back, things had changed…

When I got my next email from Apple, things had expanded…

Once again, life intrudes and I'm gone for a bit. I come back to some encouraging news, though—they found a cause of the sync hangs I'd been seeing.

The realization that I've probably ruined at least part of one or more Apple engineer's weekend hits me…they are working very hard to solve my problem, on a weekend, and I really do appreciate that.

And that's about where the weekend ended. Other than this little freebie that some jerk gave me while we were out to dinner Friday night.

Sigh. And now, you all know what I know. The only news this morning is that I discovered I actually had triplicates of some of my duplicates. In eliminating those, I found that every single one of them was a really old purchase:

All of these dupes had slightly modified metadata (new album titles, umlauts in track names, etc.), and I have no idea how I got them—I don't use iTunes Match, and I don't edit metadata myself. In any event, the dupes and trips are gone now. (Movies still don't sync, though.)

I'm not sure what will happen today, but I'll be sure to update Twitter on any progress towards solving the sync problem.

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1 thought on “An iPhone 6, (no) movies, and me”

  1. Chucky

    Your movies have been sent to Ireland to help Apple illegally evade taxes.

    It's win-win!

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