Wings Over Scotland

Well, that’ll teach me to write a loving but very gently semi-critical appraisal of the iPad. Apple’s crack Unbeliever Punishment Squad was scrambled immediately, and within 24 hours punishment was duly delivered.

The main engine of retribution was to be – as is so often the case – the vile, stinking, loathing-fuelled execresence that is PC iTunes.

The bait part of Apple’s classic bait-and-switch policy of vengeful consumer chastisement was the release of iOS4.2, the much-needed update finally bringing multitasking, Game Center and many other functions to the iPad – previously the clumsy, neglected lunk of the iOS family. Stumbling in from a successful late-night poker session in the early hours of Tuesday morning, I noticed that the long-awaited new firmware was finally available and decided to quickly install it before going to bed.

I know – you’re laughing already, right?

The first stumbling block was that for no defensible reason whatsoever, iOS4.2 refuses to install if you’re not running the latest version of iTunes (10.1). I’d never got round to upgrading from iTunes 9.2, for a variety of perfectly sound reasons including the fact that iTunes 10 disabled the incredibly handy drag-and-drop method of adding songs to your music library. (They’ve fixed it again in 10.1, but there was no way of knowing that.)

Still, the advantages of having iOS4.2 on the iPad outweighed the irritations of iTunes 10, so on it went. A ridiculous 45 minutes later it had downloaded and finally finished twatting around unskippably “rebuilding your music library” (what aspect of it needed rebuilt? It’s all the same files in the same place they were before, you inept shitpile of code), and now only required a complete reboot of my PC, because apparently iTunes thinks it’s still fucking 1996.

So one reboot later, barely over an hour had passed by the time I’d finished actually downloading the thing I wanted and started installing it onto my 64GB iPod Touch. Now, the Touch is my main daily iThing for downloading new apps to, on account of its vast storage space. My iPhone 4’s piddly 32GB is basically already crammed full, so I check stuff out on the Touch and only put it on the iPhone (my out-and-about device) if it’s really good.

What that means is that the Touch has over 1000 apps on it, and that’s a number for which Apple’s laughably idiotic limit of 11 app pages is completely inadequate. (Why they sell a device with enough capacity for about 4000 apps at any one time, but until recently only had enough onscreen slots for 176 of them, is anyone’s guess.)

The introduction of folders with iOS3 (?) was a big boon and increases the theoretical maximum up to 2112, which you’d imagine would be plenty for just about anyone, but hold on a minute.

If you’re the sort of person with a four-figure app count, organising those into folders is no small task. How exactly are you supposed to achieve it? Let’s say, for example, that you decided to organise by genre, which is the most immediately obvious strategy. If you’ve got four pinball games, it’s a simple job to put those in a “Pinball” folder. But wait – that means you’ve used up the 12 slots in that folder for just four games, and wasted eight.

Repeat for every genre you don’t own at least a dozen games in and soon you’re going to have slashed your app capacity to a fraction of that theoretical 2112. Hmm. What if we broaden the category to include any type of game you might find in an arcade – let’s say by adding coin-pusher games like Coin Dozer and air hockey games?

Except that’s no good because I’ve got MORE than 12 of those altogether, so I’d have to pick only two categories, and what the hell do you call a folder containing pinball and air-hockey games when you’ve only got about 14 characters to play with before iOS gives up and displays the folder name as the unhelpful “Pinb….shers“?

(Also, what happens if you download another air-hockey game that takes you over 12 for the combined category? You’d have to extract those all to their own folder and either leave the Pinball folder with eight unused slots or find something else to put in there, and before you know it you’ve wasted half a day recategorising and renaming your entire app library.)

Arranging by genre, then, is a bit of a non-starter. What about alphabetical order? Again, it’s a wasteful method – if you’ve got 13 apps starting with “A”, that’s 11 wasted slots in the second folder and a large reduction in app capacity. It’s also inherently highly unsatisfactory – you don’t put all your socks in one drawer with your soup spoons just because they start with the same letter, do you? That somewhat defeats the entire point of having organisational furniture (whether it’s physical or virtual) in the first place.

(I also think it’s safe to say that most people like to have at least the first couple of app pages dedicated to the stuff they use most frequently, displayed under their own individual icons, without dicking around looking in folders for it. Just two pages of those is almost 400 more slots lost.)

So anyway, to cut an already-long story short, my iPod Touch had more than 11 app pages on it. There’s been a simple exploit in the firmware for many, many revisions – possibly since the introduction of the device, in fact – by which you could fairly easily add as many new ones as you wanted. In the pre-folders days my 64GB Touch had had over 70 pages, but since iOS3 I’d got it down to a tidier 20, which was just enough to contain 1000 apps arranged by genre with a few pages of individual favourites.

Since iTunes semi-supports that many (the Apps tab shows 20 app pages and lets you move icons around on them, although inexplicably only the first 11 are actually shown on the device itself), I’d figured it was probably a number reasonably safe from Apple’s neurotic obsessive-compulsive control-freakery.

You’d think I’d know better at my age, wouldn’t you?

No sooner had the iPod Touch finished installing iOS4.2 than I noticed to my horror that all the extra app pages were gone. Already cursing Apple’s customer-hating stupidity and the several hours it was about to cost me to put them all back on with the exploit and restore everything that had been on them, I became even more distressed and sweary when I discovered that the exploit  – known about for many months, never interfered with through numerous firmware revisions and not mentioned anywhere as having been removed – didn’t work any more.

At first I couldn’t believe even Apple could be quite that spiteful and retarded, so I wasted an entire day restoring the three-quarters-full Touch from a pre-iOS4.2 backup, a process that takes around 14 hours. When it was finished, only about 30 of my apps were displayed. I tried again from a different backup and got the same result. I tried doing a clean restore then syncing from the backup, then I tried a nuclear-option DFU restore and sync, but both of those just got the same crappy 30 apps.

As I write this, I’ve wasted a full two days trying to restore my iPod Touch to its pre-iOS4 functionality.  (I’m just thankful I started with it rather than my iPhone, which will be getting “updated” to 4.2 when they pry it out of my cold dead fingers.) Earlier today I downgraded it back to iOS4.1 – using the handy files located here – before Apple switch the older firmware off, and it’s currently a couple of hours into a restore from a pre-4.2 backup.

Even if that’s worked (estimated completion time: around 1am tomorrow, 11 hours from now), there’ll still be significant work to do putting back everything that was changed between the date of that backup and Tuesday morning, but at least I might have a Touch that fulfils its purpose again.

No thanks to Apple, the loathsome, cretinous fucking cunts.

EDIT: At 2.04am the sync completed. All app pages have been restored, which means that it is indeed iOS4.2 that fucks everything up – not, as I suddenly feared with an icy chill of horror at around 11pm, iTunes 10. (Which would have meant I could never sync my iPhone again.) So if you’ve installed iOS4.2 and just realised what a terrible mistake you’ve made, pop over to iClarified, download the 4.1 IPSW file and get downgrading while it’s still possible, which won’t be for long.