Apple iSync

» see apple.com/isync as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

iSync sat on the mac side of a divide i never crossed. In 2003 the mac was a single-digit-percent machine in turkey, and a sync utility for it was, by definition, news for somebody else. Apple shipped the 1.0 release on January 2, 2003 after a public beta the previous September, licensing the underlying technology from fusionOne and bundling it with Mac OS X Panther a few months later.

The pitch was domestic. Your address book and calendar lived on the powerbook. When you plugged in a SyncML phone over bluetooth, iSync moved contacts and birthdays both ways without anyone in the middle. By version 3.1.2 in November 2010 the catalog of supported handsets ran into the dozens, mostly Nokia and Sony Ericsson, with Palm and BlackBerry filled in through third-party plugins.

Then iCloud killed the model. When the iPhone arrived in 2007 Apple stopped caring whether your phone agreed with your laptop and started caring whether both agreed with a server in north carolina. iSync's whole premise that two devices could just exchange data in your kitchen became outdated overnight. The removal in OS X Lion on July 20, 2011 came with no press release and no goodbye post.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the sync era ~

The early 2000s were the one window where syncing a phone to a desktop computer was a real consumer problem. PIM software lived in Outlook on Windows and in Address Book on the mac. Phones had become smart enough to hold a useful number of contacts but not smart enough to live without the desktop. SyncML was the open standard that briefly looked like it would solve this for everyone. Apple's bet with iSync was that they could make the mac side of that bargain feel as Apple as iTunes already did.

It mostly worked. Reviewers in 2003 and 2004 praised the one-click sync. A mac user who carried a Sony Ericsson T610 in their pocket got a sync flow that was nicer than anything you could get on Windows without paying for third-party software. Apple even bundled iSync with.Mac so that two macs could keep their address books in agreement.

~ the iphone problem ~

The iPhone landed in 2007 and immediately did not need iSync at all. It synced through iTunes for the first few years, then through iCloud after 2011. Suddenly the whole reason iSync existed, that the phone in your hand was a different organism from the laptop on your desk, was gone for the customer Apple cared most about.

The other shoe was SyncML itself. The standard never won the way its sponsors hoped, since Outlook stayed locked to ActiveSync and BlackBerry stayed locked to BES. The Windows Mobile world started its long collapse before SyncML could establish itself anywhere mainstream.

~ what survived ~

iSync is the small artifact that proves there was a brief moment when Apple cared about your other devices being not-apple. The 1.0 release shipped a year before the iTunes Music Store and four years before iOS would harden the assumption that your data lived on Apple's terms or not at all. After Lion the whole frame disappeared. macOS does not ship a generic sync tool today because there is nothing generic to sync to.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »