If you’ve updated your iPhone to iOS 6.1 and you’ve found your device constantly drained of battery life, or your data plan has maxed out really quickly for no apparent reason, or your network carrier has begged you not to upgrade to iOS 6.1 because it’s brought their network down (yes, that has happened), well, Apple finally has an answer: it’s the Sync of Doom!

Yes, from Apple, the same company that brought you Antennagate, now we have the Sync of Doom! (I love saying that!) What happens when you have an Apple iOS calendar app syncing to a Microsoft Exchange server for calendar information? Well, usually nothing unexpected.

But!

… If you do that and happen to change a single instance of a reoccurring event, an Apple bug will cause the iOS app to infinitely attempt to sync with the Microsoft Exchange Server.

Flooding all servers in between your iPhone and the Exchange Server with useless sync attempts, often dragging those servers to a crawl.

Not to mention causing your iPhone to chew up your 3G or 4G data plan like it was nothing.

Or for that matter eating up the battery of your iPhone by keeping the phone constantly communicating wirelessly and never able to go to sleep internally.

As the Sync of Doom! from Apple’s buggy iOS calendar app continues trying over and over and over to sync to the Exchange server.

Basically, this is really a bug that should have been caught long before release.

But wasn’t.

The Sync of Doom!

Brought to you by Apple.

There is some good news however. If your phone is suffering from the Sync of Doom! you can manually make it stop. Disabling and then re-enabling the connection to the Microsoft Exchange server seems to fix the Sync of Doom! (Which is basically to turn your calendar off, and then back on.)

Of course when the Sync of Doom! bug will actually be fixed is another matter entirely. It hasn’t happened yet, that’s for sure. When Apple will get around to releasing that fix, you’ll just have to wait to find out.

So if you’re an iPhone user and your calendar data comes from a Microsoft Exchange Server, you’re going to want to be extra careful.  Consider this your warning.  There’s a bug, but with diligence you can prevent it from eating up your data plan, eating up your battery life, and bringing networks to a crawl.  It’s not a virus.  It’s just Apple being Apple lately.

Does Apple expect to somehow magically turn up evidence that they did not collude with book publishers to fix the prices of electronic books? With Macmillan joining in with everyone else now (except Apple) and settling with the US Department of Justice in the electronic-book price-fixing lawsuit, that means every single paper publisher has settled. No one has claimed guilt or innocence in their settlements, and now that they’ve settled, they never will be found innocent or guilty in a trial.

Except for Apple, it seems.

The one and only party to continue to plead themselves innocent and fight on.

It’s hard to believe that this lawsuit has drug on since April of 2012 when the case and evidence is pretty straight forward. A part of the terms of Apple’s contract with book publishers to make their e-books available through Apple was quite clear and simple: The ebooks could not be sold elsewhere for less. Prices had to be identical (or more) to Apple.

If that isn’t the very definition of “price fixing” then I clearly don’t know what is!

You can’t really say that all of the other publishing houses agree on that, as by settling they completely avoid having to admit any culpability and with that magic escape hatch from the trial can neither be found guilty … nor innocent, I would point out. However, it now can be said that not a single publishing house thought that the court case was one worth risking being found guilty during.  Not a single publishing house thought that the lawsuit was worth fighting.

Except for Apple.

The lone warrior.

Adamant in their innocence.

And it’s beginning to look like as the only one actually new to book publishing, Apple is perhaps the only one of the lot of alleged colluders  to not fully understand the laws involved?

Now that Apple finds themselves all alone it should be interesting to see how long their continue to tilt at windmills before caving in and settling. Because we all know, Apple can’t possibly let this lawsuit actually come to completion, not when the very contract that they wrote up is all of the evidence that anyone needs to decide on a verdict of guilty.

On the plus side, now that no one is swallowing Apple’s bitter pill anymore, expect the last of the e-book prices to return to sane levels again.  Except, of course, for those from Apple, who wouldn’t know competitive pricing even if it bit a chunk out of their logo.

Way back when Apple unleashed raw awesome power of the iOS 6.0.1 update, it turned out that all it contained were bug fixes. No new features. Basically, it was nothing to get excited about. But people forgave Apple for that because they’d only just introduced the exciting new iOS6 anyway. There was still a lot of shiny shiny in people’s hearts.

So now Apple has finally released a major version update with iOS 6.1. So what exciting new things are in iOS 6.1?

Well…

Umm…

Bug fixes.

And some minor tweaks to iTunes and Siri.

Yay?

Oh, and better support of LTE.

Meh.  Welcome to this century.

So then, no real game-changers in iOS 6.1 Nothing new and exciting like all of those Android owners have been using for a while now.

Darn.

But it gets worse yet. Because ever since iOS 6 there’s been one major bug to many iPhone / iPad owners out there. For reasons unknown, their Wi-Fi has been disabled! The switch to turn Wi-Fi on, if it appears at all, is always greyed out. They are Wi-Fi-less. (To me, personally, that’d be completely unthinkable!)

So then if iOS 6.1 is chock full of bugfixes (and not much else) then surely this bug has finally been fixed and those suckers customers who upgraded to iOS 6 only to lose their Wi-Fi in the process can finally get it back, right?

Well…

Umm…

Not so much, no.

For whatever reasons, the thoughts that pass through the great and mighty minds at Apple have kind of, sort of, maybe just a little bit forgotten that this bug causing a loss of Wi-Fi needs to be fixed, it seems.

Oops.

Bad Apple!

Bad Apple! Fix your Wi-Fi bugs already!

Maybe next update then, Apple customers. Maybe next update.

Of course if you’d like for a phone with Wi-Fi that works, you could always try Android.

Or Windows Phone.

Or Nokia Belle.

Or, basically, anyone but Apple. Apple, the people who brought you Antennagate  and Antennagate 2, are continuing to show their superior wireless technology prowess.

Maybe it’s time to “Think Different”.

Adults may be embracing All Things Apple with open arms, but as it turns out, those darned rebellious teenagers just aren’t so easily won over, perhaps because of the iPhone’s popularity amongst adults. Today’s youth is starting to “think different” and not in the way that Apple would prefer. According to Buzz Marketing Group’s Tina Wells, “Teens are telling us Apple is done.”

Surveys show that the number of teenagers and younger folk wanting an iPhone for Christmas is dropping. Market dominators like Samsung are eating Apple’s ground in today’s youth with their better and cheaper smartphones. Several reasons have been postulated, by many, of course, for this decline of Apple in the eyes of the apples of our eyes. The reasoning ranges from teenagers having to differentiate themselves from their uncool parents, to Apple’s phones failing to innovate compared to Android, the ability of young minds to embrace less-than-perfect implementations that offer more features compared to a locked platform that “just works”, price and how likely parents are to spend that money, even to Apple’s recent rampant litigious nature and their market dominance in general making them appear to be the hated Big Bully of Phones. Also suggested on the list of things that aren’t helping Apple is that the latest iPhone 5 launch really wasn’t a technological improvement over the iPhone 4S, making Apple appear to be stagnant and stale.

Ouch.

When you put it all like that…

One can’t really argue against any of those observations. Whether or not teens are dissing Apple’s iPhone now because of any one of them, or even all of them combined, is really anyone’s guess. But surveys show that tomorrow’s leaders are far less impressed than they used to be by the fruity god of cellphones. Can Apple regain their faith? Or as these young adults grow up into breadwinners and consumers in their own rights is the Cult of Cupertino coming to an end? Perhaps there’s more room than we thought for a third and fourth phone ecosystem after all. Windows Phone? BlackBerry? Symbian? Or something else entirely? The less you are like Apple, the more chance you may have. Perhaps the schoolgirls in Microsoft’s Surface advertisement weren’t so misplaced after all.

Still reeling from that rather egg-faced Maps app blunder, Apple goes ahead with another act of brilliance. From the people who brought you the marketing campaign of, “It Just Works” … we now bring you Apple’s latest iOS campaign, “It Just Works … Except For When It Doesn’t.”

What is it that Apple has somehow failed to properly test before pushing upon the world this time? That would be Apple’s Do Not Disturb, a feature just recently advertised to the world in what has to be one of the worst-timed marketing campaigns ever.

About as akin to a real working feature as “table tennis” is a sport to Serena and Venus Williams, Do Not Disturb is Apple’s latest gimmick to convince you that they know what they’re doing over there in the phone world. The new feature (if one can even call it that*) switches the phone over to a mode in which it rejects calls from most people … depending on how you set it up. One of the settings is that Do Not Disturb can expire at a given time. Unfortunately, Apple apparently forgot to actually test that feature of Do Not Disturb, because much to everyone’s chagrin, it doesn’t expire.  Ever. With no real warning you could find that having tried to use Do Not Disturb has put you into a permanent state of silence. While the “Sound of Silence” might be golden to the ears of Simon and Garfunkel, it’s not a state your phone should be in permanently.

Fortunately for iPhone users, Do Not Disturb can be manually cancelled, saving you from Apple’s bug. Until Apple pushes out an iOS fix for this buggy feature, manually turning the Do Not Disturb off would really would be the only way you can exit Do Not Disturb mode.

And while nowhere near as much of a facepalm as Apple’s ever-so-brilliant decision to boot Google’s Maps app from iOS (Thank goodness Apple did an about-face on that one!) this daffy bug in their just-advertised Do Not Disturb feature is definitely not something that is exactly winning wayward Android customers back to Apple.

It’s also rather a mounting pile of “Hmmmm…” atop the question of, “Can Apple really survive the death of Steve Jobs?” For a company whose reputation is practically built upon their ability to make things foolproof, they’ve been looking quite the fools as of late. One wonders when (or even if) they’ll get their act together once more, let alone when (or, again, if) they’ll actually wow the world. So far, it’s not looking so very good.

-hr-

*= Why do I question whether Do Not Disturb is even a new feature of cell phones? Well, for far longer than Apple has had Do Not Disturb, my good old Nokia C6-01 now running Symbian Nokia Belle has had a similar (but better) feature in that any time I switch to a different ringtone profile (such as “normal”, “vibrate”, “silent”, “airplane”, or any mode I’ve added and/or customized) one of the options there is to put that profile into a timed mode that expires. So it’s just like Apple’s Do Not Disturb feature … except that it’s even more flexible. Oh, and that it actually works. Right. Can’t forget that one.