When Gizmodo honcho Brian Lam found out via Twitter that one of his readers was experiencing a brutal 8-hour iPhone sync, he did what any EiC worth his postings would do: secured time-lapse video! To put 8 painful hours fully into perspective:
That's a full night of sleep. That's a full day of high school. That's longer than it takes to fly cross country, or drive from SF to Los Angeles. After seeing this video, I stopped complaining and tried to figure out what caused Brandon's problem with him.
Heck, it's a wait in an launch day Apple Store line! They tried syncing via a MacBook Air and an iMac, and even switched out cables, but the 74 App sync just wouldn't -- indeed couldn't! -- be tamed.
Atypical? For certain. Incredible? Pretty much. If it were us? We'd probably nuke the thing, bury it upside down, cover it in concrete, and salt the earth -- then politely ask Steve Jobs to start over...
Luckily, my longest sync has probably never topped 5 minutes. What about you? What's your longest sync been to date?
Reader comments
Indefatigable Giz and the 8-Hour Sync of Doom
About 2 hours...
The longest sync I've had was 10 mins. 95% of the time it only takes me 2-5 mins to sync.
I could be wrong but the longest syncs are the very first ones when you are putting a lot of apps on to the phone at once. All other times my sync times have been normal as well. 2 minutes or so.
my longest sync was 2 months.
no kidding 2 months.
A minute to a minute and half.
2H for uploading vids, pics, a few apps and complet a backup.
Wait for the ZunePhone people!
I have had over 8 hours to sync. But I have my iPhone loaded up. It also seems to depend on conditions that I can't understand.
From one > 8 hour sync, the next might be around 10 mins. Since I have had to reinstall the Op system a few times, it is tough to know when conditions r right for the 8 hour sync.
about two hours... until i finally went ahead and started fresh: cleaned out the memory and reinstalled the software.
Wow that sucks... My longest sync took about 3 hours.
Mine took almost an hour today. I sure hope it's not the apps that are causing the issues. I try to keep my phone to just three screens.
i'm pretty sure all of my syncs have taken close to an hour. at least 30+ minutes
My longest sync has been 8-10 hours. It's gotten better since I reset the iPhone, but it still takes on the order of 2 hours for a full sync.
well it depends how much stuff you put in the iPhone. Normaly if you pload 12 gigs to the iPhone it should take about 45min to an hour depending how fast your comp is. If u have a slow comp it might take up to 3 hours for 12 gig upload. My full syncs 14gig upload are about 45min. But now that I have about 40apps installed it takes about 5 min to install a new app. My iPhone has been freezing a lot more than when I had less apps.
Mine has taken atleast 2 hours, which doesn't make sense because I don't have much music (maybe 1 gb) on it.
Around half an hour every time, irrespective of how many apps I've loaded onto it. It's quite disgraceful, really - but then, so too are the dropped calls, the sloooooow text messaging (it takes about 20 seconds sometimes for a key press to show up on screen), the occasional lockups meaning I try to answer calls and can't... I still love my iPhone, but the fact is it's as buggy as hell. x
Ditto on the super slow texting and waiting 10-20 seconds for the phone to register a button push. So lame.
wow, my longest sync was over 8 hours, i started it before i went to bed, and woke up and it was half done. i just cancelled and disabled backups since