I’ve already had to “restore” my iTouch a half dozen times in about a month.

And something else I noticed, if you remove most of your applications, especially the larger ones, the synch/backups go a LOT quicker!

As for the marketing deadline, I’m afraid they had no choice. Once the wheels were set in motion, there was no way to stop it. Too much was invested. For example they had shipments going to all the stores. Employees where hired and trained. Commercials all around the world had been playing with that date. Third Party developers were preparing for that date. In other words they couldn’t really change easily.

The question is was it worth it? I think it was for them because the cost would have been much higher otherwise.

One thing though, Steve Jobs should really start to learn that he can’t continually get away with very aggressive timelines. He’s been pushing for years now, and eventually something has to give. It probably doesn’t help that his initially experiencing with building technical stuff (the original Apples) was with Woz. That guys a genius and he can pull off miracles. But as you get bigger and bigger, aggressive timelines for products such as the iPhone become harder and harder to meet.

I can’t wait to see what will happen with the iPhone 3.0.

Btw congrats on your release of Text2Go version 3.0!

This was particularly apparent when the new range of iPods was released (including the touch). For a while there it seemed like there was a new release of iTunes every day.

I also discovered this latest release, iTunes 7.7.0 had broken part of the COM interface that my application uses to integrate with iTunes.

I reported the bug to Apple but a few days later, not wanting to be dependent on Apple, decided to create a workaround.

I was however pleasantly surprised that Apple released a fix a week later in 7.7.1.

Coming back to the point of your article, it’s interesting that Apple have risked doing serious damage to their brand in order to meet their own marketing deadline.