Q: How to locally sync an iPhone with OS X Mavericks? iCloud is NOT an option.

I would never dare to provide investment advice to someone, such as yourself, who is so obviously superior to me in intellect.

Sadly, Gerrit7 never requested any investment advice from you, although you are probably correct regarding the intellect part.

You are correct that there are a lot of trolls on the Internet. Nevetheless, sometimes people are who they say they are.

KiltedTim (or even Gerrit7 who you actually replied to) isn't the one boasting about his supposed business acumen on a user-to-user technical support forum, as if that gives any greater credence to his opinions.

It's kinda funny you say you call businesses who ignore their customers "out of business" when a good proportion of the companies listed on 'your' LinkedIn profile are exactly that...

Focussing on doing a few things well, rather than implementing every single feature every customer demands is what has made Apple the success it is today, from almost going "out of business" in the 1990's.

Apparently, you can't figure out how to actually reply to the person you are trying to speak to... Which either says a lot about the likelyhood that you are, actually, a troll, or should serve as a warning to anyone considering either taking your advice, or doing business with you.

In the hopes that this suggestion might actually  help someone, rather than continue the degeneration into name calling, here is the solution I have found that works for me.  It involves syncing with Google calendar and contacts — so if this is something you wouldn’t want to do, don’t read any further. For me, this is an excellent substitute for iCloud.

My issue with the forced iCloud sync is not so much about data privacy (I really don’t think anyone can expect privacy in today’s world) but that iCloud has never worked properly for me.  Here is a quote from an article that pretty much describes my feelings:

For a company that prides itself on craftsmanship and a beautiful user experience, Apple's cloud services continue to be more than a blemish on the company's reputation. They are a serious black hole.

 

Google, meanwhile, was born in the cloud, and it shows: things like document and calendar synchronisation just work, and across a dizzying breadth of devices.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/20/apple_fails_at_cloud_leaving_market_open _to_android/

For well over a year I have been happily using an alternative to iCal — Readdle’s Calendars app, which syncs with Google Calendar (and with iCal if you want, but I've stopped using that). 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/calendars-by-readdle-sync/id608834326

Now I have just begun using Contacts Sync for Gmail to do the same for my contacts. 

http://contactssyncforgmail.com

I was amazed at how quickly and easily this app merged my Apple and Google contacts, with almost no duplication. 

Both have free trial versions, and the full apps are quite reasonably priced.

My apologies. Upon reflection I should not have started a business discussion on a user board devoted to solving a technical problem. I was simply frustrated that a function upon which I depend every day had been eliminated. I should not have upgraded to Mavericks without checking first the user boards for problems. It was a rookie mistake.

From what I can tell having read all the boards and searched extensively on the Web. the only potential solution to this problem without going through the hassle of reinstalling the operating system is use Microsoft Exchange. I will try to implement that solution and will get back to you all with my experience.

KiltedTim wrote:

 

I have to say I believe your assessment of the situation is, frankly, moronic.

 

The feature was deprecated in 10.7. Apple published that. They didnt' try to hide anything. It seems the only people complaining are those who are both ultraparanoid and stupid enough to install a .0 release of an operating system without bothering to investigate compatiblility or even read a review first. Honestly, I don't see how both can be true at the same time without creating a giant matter sucking black hole of a paradox, but it seems it can actually happen.

Deprecated - To mark (a component of a software standard) as obsolete to warn against its use in the future so that it may be phased out.

Could you please tell which learned journal Apple warned Mac users against using local Sync-Services because they were planning to phase it out?

The main question remains: why is local synchronising so unwanted by Apple (or Google for that matter)? In what way does it hurt Apple?

Nice that developers were given the information that it was eventually being phased out 2 years ago, why not ask customers first if this is a good idea? Or please had us informed as well, so I would have been able to adjust my purchases accordingly. Now my Apple products will be phased out in my household. Sad to say.

It's sad to see a wonderful world go.

Back to the old days I'm afraid. It could have been so good. :-(

Gerrit7 wrote:

 

I read that OS X Mavericks will no longer allow me to use iTunes to sync my iPhone to a local system but makes iCloud mandatory? Is that correct?

 

 

No. Completely wrong.

Cheers

Pete

Could you please tell which learned journal Apple warned Mac users against using local Sync-Services because they were planning to phase it out?

It was (and still is) in the Apple OS X Developer Documention for OS X 10.7. As SyncServices is a developer framework, not something end-users access directly, the information was provided to OS X developers.

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/OSX_Tech nology_Overview/SystemFrameworks/SystemFrameworks.html

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/General/MacOSXLionAPIDiffs/ SyncServices.html

the only potential solution to this problem without going through the hassle of reinstalling the operating system is use Microsoft Exchange.

Which works in the same way as iCloud, or Google Sync, or Fruux, or any one of the many other server-based syncing solutions based on CardDAV and CalDAV, except that Exchange is proprietary to Microsoft.

The main question remains: why is local synchronising so unwanted by Apple (or Google for that matter)? In what way does it hurt Apple?

The CalDAV and CardDAV protocols iCloud uses are cross-platform, open standards, used industry-wide. Apple have said that iCloud is part of their "strategy for the next decade", and the future is wireless devices, not wired.

SyncServices was Apple's own, old, Mac-only, proprietary, limited, and often buggy, sync protocol.

There is no cross-platform, open, industry standard protocol for local syncing that Apple can use. Apple are (rightly) moving away from proprietary, closed protocols. Trying to develop one that would be accepted and adopted by the rest of the industry is most likely an impossible task, and there's no point abandoning one proprietary protocol just to develop another.

brollyjohn wrote:

 

You're late to the party genius.

 

This discussion has gone over the TOU in detail with more than a few irate commenters.

Apparently you are still confused:

Yeah they've been trying to silence the petition for a while now...

As "buggy" as you say local sync was, there is obviously a major backlash against this move.

The vast majority of people on this board just want local sync back.

Along with the thousands who have signed the petition (of which none shall speaketh)

Let's bring back the functionality of the little USB cable that worked so well up to now and stop the windows 98-ification of OSX.