When there's a problem with an Apple product, get ready to deal with super assholes. They gravitate to Apple. Always have and always will. With that in mind, I'm going to tell you what happened when I plugged my new iPad into my Mac. I'm just going to tell you what happened. I don't care if the assholes swoop in and are asshole-like.

I checked in the middle of the night, the Fedex tracking report said it had just left Anchorage. By the time I was at work at 10AM, it had been delivered. Went downstairs to get it, took a picture, upgraded iTunes. Connected my old iPad. Connected the new one. It asked if I wanted to clone the old one or start anew, I said clone it. Took five minutes. Booted up. Whoa, where are my apps? There are a few new ones. But the old ones are gone. Disconnected. Reconnected. Says it's synching. Backing up.

Ahhh. It looks like you have to specifically choose to synch Apps. That's what it's doing now. Makes no sense. I already said clone it.

Now more of the apps are there, but not all of them. It doesn't seem to have synched the Kindle app. It's one of my most-used. Or Words With Friends, or the various versions of Angry Birds I have been using. What is going on here? (I can hear some Apple idiot saying "It worked for me.")

Now I see what's going on. They put all their apps on the first two screens, and my apps come after that.

Tried using the Kindle app and it wants me to re-register. I hope they're not all going to be like this. (Yes, it has forgotten all the passwords. For everything. Arrgh.)

And all the apps I paid for are missing. This is ridiculous. If they said when you get a new iPad you have to re-buy all the apps you use, well, I wouldn't have bought a new iPad. Getting a new toy is supposed to be fun. What about the games I was in the middle of, and the books I was reading. Places lost in all of them. Still hoping there's something I can do to just copy the whole iPad 1 to the new iPad 2 so I can avoid all this. I don't want to send the new one back. Really don't.

Further, I don't dare plug the old iPad into iTunes for fear that it will do the same thing to it that it did to the new one.

According to the commenters this is a common experience. You often have to re-download your apps when upgrading to something new from Apple. And if that doesn't work, you get to "contact customer service." As if my time were worth nothing. I honestly don't see any of that happening. And forgive me, but I'm totally disappointed this thing didn't "just work" -- I thought that was Apple's business model.

New approach.

1. I'm wiping the new iPad.

2. Just did a backup of the old one. (Summoned my courage and it didn't seem to kill it.)

3. Going to try to restore the new iPad from the backup of the old one.

4. BTW, the reason you don't want to start over with these things is games like Angry Birds make you start over at the beginning, slogging your way through the beginner stuff. And there's lots of that. I had completed every level and was working on getting to three stars on all the latest stuff.

Finished doing the restore, I'm going to let it sit for a while per Joseph Rosario's recommendation, but it appears nothing is different. My guess is that they don't back up the for-pay apps, that's why you get the weird dialog when you back up your iPad saying you have paid-for apps on it. I always wonder why they needed to tell me that, now I know. All I get are the worthless crap apps I didn't want, and none of the apps that I decided to use and therefore was willing to buy the premium version of. Now I have to remember what they all are and hope they really let me re-download them. All this I guess is supposed to prevent piracy, but I'm not sure how that works. The old copies are still on the iPad I cloned. So I will, when it's all over, have two copies I can use. Unless somehow they deauthorize the other copy. I bet they do.

I think that's where we're going to leave it. Yes I am installing all the purchased apps, at least the ones I can remember that I purchased. The good news is that it remembered where I was in each of the games. I have a move to respond to in Words With Friends. But they made me work way too hard, spoiled the first-time experience. On the other hand I had some fun at the expense of with Apple zealots.

 3/18/2011; 11:00:45 AM.   .