Are you kidding me Apple?

June 7, 2010 10:35 AM

Just got a new Apple laptop and now my iPhone cable doesn't work. Is this for real?

So I got a new MacBook Pro and my iPhone wouldn't sync. After some reading on the Apple support forums I try an "official" Apple USB iPhone/iPod cable and it worked fine.

The non-Apple cable worked fine with my old MBP and still charges my iPhone but I can not sync the iPhone with it. I get either a "...disk not found..." error or it just never syncs. So the question is did my cheap non-Apple cable break or has Apple changed something so it won't work? Or you know, something else.

posted by bytewrite to Education (9 answers total)

I use some cheap $0.79 sync cable with all my iWhatevers, without difficulty on my Fall 2009 Macbook Pro. If something changed, it'd be very strange, as I don't think there's actually any integrated circuits or intelligent logic built into the cables. And it'd be very, very, very strange for a new Macbook to have *hardware* that would break 3rd party sync cables, as it's definitely not a software thing.

So your cable probably broke or flaked out.
posted by Rendus at 10:42 AM on June 7, 2010

The fastest way to find out is to use the old cable with your iPhone on another computer.
posted by meowzilla at 10:50 AM on June 7, 2010

Response by poster: If I have an account on another Apple machine can i safely sync my iPhone to that machine without running the risk of loosing all my data? If so I'll do that and test to see if is a broken cable.

Also just for completeness I have the new (mid-2010, Core i5/i7) Macbook Pro.
posted by bytewrite at 10:56 AM on June 7, 2010

There's also the possibility the USB chipset on the new Macbooks is more sensitive/touchy/finicky and the cable you're using is out of spec in some way, etc. And so it may be more of a "new laptop models" thing than anything specific to the new MBPs.
posted by Rendus at 11:10 AM on June 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

Best answer: If you just need to test if it works, do a backup instead of syncing (right click on the iPhone in the left pane). Syncing has a non-zero chance of clearing out things on your phone, backing up by comparison is much safer.
posted by meowzilla at 11:28 AM on June 7, 2010

Response by poster: So I did as Meowzilla suggested. Plugged the old cable into an iMac and made a backup of the iPhone with no problem. So I suppose it may be something that along the lines that Rendus suggested. I do not like this.
posted by bytewrite at 12:26 PM on June 7, 2010

They definitely pull this kind of thing. I have an old iPod FireWire-to-mains adapter and an iPod FireWire cable that plugs into my iPhone, but the iPhone refuses to charge from it. By which I mean it pops up a message saying that the charger is not compatible.
posted by galaksit at 2:14 PM on June 7, 2010

Download & reinstall iTunes: http://www.apple.com/itunes/ , it contains the iPhone driver. This is after you've already run software update.
posted by TimeDoctor at 1:15 AM on June 8, 2010

It's probably the cable itself. I've used (Apple) cables interchangeably b/t original/3G/3GS iphones on a variety of Macs.

(iPhones use a different connector than the old iPods, so you can't normally swap between those.)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 3:28 PM on June 8, 2010