My iPhone isn't playing nice with my iBook.

January 16, 2010 6:20 AM

I have an iPhone 3G and an old iBook G4 running iTunes 8.2.23, and this morning when I plugged the phone into the laptop iTunes no longer seemed to recognize the phone. iPhoto opens automatically and asks if I want to download my photos, but when I go into iTunes the phone doesn't show up in the menu on the left side of the screen and I get the spinning wheel of death. I've had the phone for about a week and it worked just fine with iTunes/my laptop until now. Any suggestions?

I should add that downloading iTunes 9 is not an option because when I did that a month ago it crashed our computer (I had to reinstall the OS to get it to work again) and then completely refused to work with our other iPod (Classic).

posted by The Card Cheat to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

This happened to me, and I just had to wait a while (like, really, five to ten minutes) for the wheel of death to stop; then the sync worked fine. Apparently this is a recognized problem, I remember Googling it and finding it on Mac forums.
posted by you're a kitty! at 6:52 AM on January 16, 2010

Try force-restarting the phone. Hold down the top button until the red swipe bar pops up. Shut it down, then plug it in and see what happens.
posted by pupdog at 6:53 AM on January 16, 2010

Reinstall iTunes if you can find this older version, though I definitely recommend getting an upgrade to work. Either way, iTunes contains the iPhone drivers at install time.
posted by TimeDoctor at 2:18 PM on January 16, 2010

Just chiming in to say I had a similar problem (Windows tho, not Mac, and I don't remember which version of iTunes, tho definitely pre-9), and what it ended up being was downloaded podcasts (iTunes U) on the iPhone. I found many people in forums complaining about the same thing. Deleting them all was a pain, but it worked - iTunes recognized it no problem after that.
posted by ClarissaWAM at 4:02 PM on January 16, 2010

I've never heard of iTunes 9 crashing a machine like that, but anyway...

* Try going into Image Capture and telling iPhoto to NOT launch. See if that works.
* Have you rebooted? (Just askin..)
* You probably don't need to reinstall iTunes. Make another test user account and plug it in. iTunes should launch. If it does, it's not your copy of iTunes - it's something in your user account.

Try creating a new iTunes library. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1589
posted by drstein at 2:52 PM on January 18, 2010