You list several fairly serious failures that are absolutely not typical.
I have had to restore my iDevices from backups several times. It has worked flawlessly every time.
I have been syncing my music library from iTunes to my iDevices since well before the iPhone existed. The only times I have ever had a problem with songs not being on the iPhone are when a) I wasn't actually syncing my whole library, but a subset, and I had forgotten which songs I hadn't synced, or b) the songs failed to sync, and iTunes/Finder gave me a big dialog box saying so, with a message explaining why for each individual song that didn't sync. This is true for songs I bought through the iTunes Store as well as those from other sources.
Does this mean I expect these things to work perfectly for everyone, every time? No, of course not. I've had my share of problems with all my Apple devices.
But it does mean that either because of user error or unusually bad products (ie, you got a lemon), your experience is not typical.
> The only times I have ever had a problem with songs not being on the iPhone are when
But would you even notice if the song showed up in your itunes list "as if" it was on the phone but, when you played it, it grabbed it off the internet (with not delay, because it streams it). I expect most people wouldn't notice this at all.
> But it does mean that either because of user error or unusually bad products
- The issue with it loading songs (that you have told it to put on the phone) from the internet is, as far as I was able to determine, intended behavior.
- The issue with it renaming every song to a "random" alphanumeric string is, also as far as I was able to determine, intended behavior. Although needing to get the songs "back out of itunes" is, I imagine, an edge case.
- The failed backup restore, I have nothing on. It didn't work, but it was long enough ago that I don't recall why. I do not think it was faulty hardware. It could have been user error... but the entire point of the iphone argument is "it just works"; "you didn't do it right" isn't really a reasonable response in that context. Especially when you consider we really couldn't find a way to recover from it.
I have had to restore my iDevices from backups several times. It has worked flawlessly every time.
I have been syncing my music library from iTunes to my iDevices since well before the iPhone existed. The only times I have ever had a problem with songs not being on the iPhone are when a) I wasn't actually syncing my whole library, but a subset, and I had forgotten which songs I hadn't synced, or b) the songs failed to sync, and iTunes/Finder gave me a big dialog box saying so, with a message explaining why for each individual song that didn't sync. This is true for songs I bought through the iTunes Store as well as those from other sources.
Does this mean I expect these things to work perfectly for everyone, every time? No, of course not. I've had my share of problems with all my Apple devices.
But it does mean that either because of user error or unusually bad products (ie, you got a lemon), your experience is not typical.