I don’t know about you, but my home is wireless. I have various devices hooking up to my home network: Macbook Pros, iPhones, Apple TV, PS3, hard drives etc… It’s great. The Apple TV is a good example actually of what I want to talk about here…

When you setup your AppleTV, you hook it up to your network (ethernet or wireless), go back to your Mac and “discover” it, and start synchronising your music, videos, photos with the device. From that point onwards the device has the ability to synchronise completely cable free between Mac and AppleTV over wireless.

So why, I wonder – after a few years now does the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch continue to require a USB cable to sync up between the Mac and the device? They all have wireless cards in them. Sure you get some power charge for your device – but that should be optional.

Apple should be thinking beyond the cable on mobile devices – they are mobile after all. My iPhone for example, hooks upto my wireless network as soon as I enter my house – it knows the network is available, and uses it. For starters, Apple really need to look at this – I want my iPhone to call my Mac when it gets back home, see if anything is new (apps, music etc), and just sync them up.

Don’t ask me to sync – Just do it.

This is the one massive pain I have with the whole iTunes, iDevice thing. I have to physically connect the two together in order to get my content synced up. That is so last decade!

Cloud it up!

Let’s go further than that. If rumours are true, Apple are looking at cloud solutions for your iTunes catalogue – effectively storing your music and maybe video collection in the cloud. What we would see is a scenario where all of our iTunes centric devices call the cloud instead of calling Macs/PCs to sync up data.

Content sync over any network, wireless or mobile.

Your Mac/PC effectively steps away from being the central storage point for your content, the cloud takes that role – and all iTunes is is the content management system. Your iPad, iPod or iPhone then hooks into the cloud anywhere, and keep the data in sync.

I think music, photo and app synchronisation has a strong possibility of going in this direction, both on mobile networks and on wireless, but I highly doubt we’ll see video sync over anything other than wireless.

Again – Don’t ask, Just do!

This is the key point – especially for a so-called “user friendly” company such as Apple – Take the action of syncing away from the user. I shouldn’t have to care about that, I shouldn’t have to figure out if x piece of content is on Y device, and whether or not I can do something until they are synced.

It should all just happen. Kind of like when OS X knows a piece of data has changed on your Mac and adds a change point in Time Machine – it just does it. It doesn’t ask you.

The important thing is to give the user some flexibility to configure what they want to sync, and not let the user worry when they need to sync.