Before I went to bed last night, I told iTunes to download a bunch of the iPhone development videos. After the first one had finished downloading, I watched it while others continued downloading.

I just checked on it, and about halfway through the download queue it stopped downloading. It consecutively reported four errors on each one, including three “Unable to check for purchases. An unknown error occurred (1001).” messages and one “There was a problem downloading ‘iPhone Development Introduction / iPhone Tech Talks / Apple Developer Connection’. An unknown error occurred (8003). Please check that the connection to the network is active and try again.”

The network is working fine, as can be seen by my ability to post this blog entry from Safari on the Mac. However, when I asked iTunes to download the videos again, it just reported the same four errors for each file, one at a time, so I had to click “OK” about 32 times, even though I didn’t think it was OK.

I tried logging in to the iTunes store again, but that didn’t fix it, and I had to click through 32 error dialogs again. Next I tried quitting the iTunes application and restarting it. It forgot what videos I’d asked it to download, so I had to select them again, and then it got the same cryptic download errors again. So finally I rebooted the Mac, logged into the iTunes store again, selected the videos, and started downloading them again, and of course got to click through 32 error dialogs yet again.

So, Mac, I thought you said that these kind of problems only happened with PC?

Today I connected the iPhone to the Mac Mini for the first time.  I had to update iTunes, but that was relatively painless, other than dealing with having forgotten my login password on the Mac (necessary for software updates).

Once iTunes was updated, I plugged in the iPhone.  I told iTunes that I do NOT want to automatically sync the iPhone.  I went to the Applications tab, and clicked that I wanted to sync all applications.

Apple’s idea of what “Sync” means is clearly completely different than mine.  Rather than copying the applications I’d purchased on the phone over to the Mac for safekeeping, it started deleting them, starting with Super Monkey Ball!  As nearly as I can tell, Apple’s idea of “Sync” is to try to make the phone contain ONLY the content that is on the Mac.

I found in a fairly non-obvious place an option to “Back Up” the iPhone to the Mac, so I tried that.  It took a while, and when it was done, it told me

Some of the purchased items on the iPhone ‘Eric Smith’s iPhone”, including the item “Enigmo” could not be transferred to your iTunes library because you are not authorized to play them on this computer.

What a crock!  I’m not trying to run them on the Mac, I just need to save a backup!

It occurred to me that I might have better results if I downloaded applications in iTunes rather than on the phone itself, and they sync them over to the phone.  I downloaded a free application “Tris”.  Then I went to the “Applications” tab, and told it to sync “Selected applications” and checked “Tris”, rather than “All Applications”.  It immediately deleted my rotary dialer application, and I stopped the sync before it could delete more.  Apparently syncing “Selected applications” means “delete any other applications you haven’t selected.”  Now I had “Tris” on the Mac with no apparent way to get it into the iPhone without losing more of the applications already on the phone.

I finally tried the backup again and noticed in the fine print that I could “Authorize” the Mac.  Once I did that, the backup worked, and now it looks like I can sync my remaining applications without them getting deleted.  Apparently if I really want Super Monkey Ball and the Rotary Dialer, I’ll have to buy them again.

I thought Apple products were supposed to be easy to use, but this is about as counter-intuitive as it gets.

I’m used to new operating system installations wanting a very small amount of personal information from the user. Windows asks for the user’s name and company, though it allows the user to leave the company blank, as would be typical for home users. Fedora Core Linux asks for the users full name (not required) and a username. Neither of these seem very onerous, and the reasons for requesting the user’s name are reasonably clear. It’s less obvious why Microsoft wants a company name, but since you can omit it, I don’t much care.

Mac OS X, on the other hand, requires the user’s full name, postal address, phone number, expected place of use (home, small business, medium business, large business, etc), and industry. It will not allow the user to proceed until this information is entered. I don’t mind entering my name, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to tell my computer any of that other stuff without a very good reason. If I don’t put personally identifying information into a computer, that makes it less likely that the information will be misused or compromised. I’m pretty sure that the C compiler isn’t going to need any of that in order to compile my programs successfully.

The pages requesting the information have a button to view Apple’s privacy policy, which explains that Apple collects the information in order to provide an exceptional user experience. Exceptionally bad, in my opinion. I was put in the position of lying to the computer. I put “n/a” for all the fields that would accept that, and all nines for the ZIP code and phone number. I selected “home” for the place the computer will be used, though I wasn’t very happy about it. I selected “other” for the industry.

Apple shouldn’t force the user to choose between revealing personal information for no good reason, and providing false information. They should allow the user to skip providing the unnecessary information, or better yet, not even attempt to collect it.