Apple’s new iOS 4 and what it means to me

Well to start off it has already cost me a whopping $1,200.00 to upgrade to iOS 4. I know you read that and said ‘Holy clam shells, Batman….” but let me explain. It took two attempts to download and install the iOS 4 upgrade. The first took 3 hours just to download before it crashed and gave up. The second took considerably less time, but upon completion I ended up with a pretty light weight brick.

I returned to my PowerBook G4, which I know is getting a bit long in the tooth but seriously I do not upgrade for the sake of upgrading. Nor for the record do I recommend such to any of my clients, however; that is an entirely different story. Thus back to the matter at hand. I returned to my computer only to find that the upgrade has not been 100% ok even 1% successful. I observed the rather obtrusive and extremely unuser friendly error message “iTunes could not connect to this iPod because an unknown error occurred (0xE8000001).” as depicted in figure 1.

Need less to say I was more than a bit irked by the results as I have spent four and a half hours working on this iPT with less than successful results. I spent several more hours investigating and attempting numerous remedies, most of which were pointless but thanks to Google’s penchant for wild goose chases I followed every lead. Many of the pages I discovered ended up nauseatingly discussing Windows only solutions, and the need for reliable USB 2.0 connectivity.

For the life of me I just resused to believe that the iOS 4 upgrade could have render my iPT a USB 2.0 only device. Honestly I had never had any sort of issue connecting it to my PBG4 before. For those of you who know me this was really beginning to bug me as I consider my iPT the perfect PDA. Ultimately fairly far down in the search results was a page that lead back to of all places Apple’s knowledge base where funnily enough this unknown error message and several others like are discussed.

Fortunately a simple reboot of my laptop and reconnecting the iPT to it solved the problem sort of. I now had several hours of restoring my iPod from the latest backup, which although painless in itself, was rather time consuming. Certainly the lack of a proper USB2.0 connection on the old PBG4 was holding me back a bit but in the end my iPT is back to normal and upgraded to iOS 4.0.

The down side is that I now have to write myself a bill for the approximate 8 hours of downloading, troubleshooting and restoring this little device. Seriously I just can not win. Seriously why would a senior technology leader like myself take the time to admit my folly in this endeavor. Well after reading all of the other hair brained schemes and ‘solutions’ I decided that some one should actually write about it and hopefully it will end up higher in the Google ranking than those other idiots, thus saving the next person some time and hopefully expense.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mikel King (http://twitter.com/mikelking) has been a leader in the Information Technology Services field for over 20 years. He is currently the CEO of Olivent Technologies, a professional creative services partnership in NY. Additionally he is currently serving as the Secretary of the BSD Certification group as well as a Senior Editor for BSD News.