I am a huge Apple fan and am typically pretty forgiving of their shortcomings, however, I must admit to being very frustrated by the Apple brand recently.

First, Leopard is not stable. I’ve had more issues with one month of leopard than the last year of Tiger. Funky wifi, lots of gray screens of death and it still isn’t able to authenticate to network attached storage devices (the same devices worked brilliantly with Tiger).

Second, I just bought a new iPod classic. Aside from initially hooking it up to my mac, the iPod is unused. Tonight, I am trying to prep it for a plane ride to the west coast and it won’t sync. It won’t update. It won’t restore. I’ve tried with different cables and different USB ports. I restarted iTunes and performed the assortment of steps one would go through to solve this problem. iTunes sees the iPod with no problems, it asks to update it, but then the update hangs and fails. A restore results in the same issue and syncing just doesn’t work.

I have some content on the device, but not want I want, so it is basically worthless to me for my trip. Come on Apple, let’s get your act together please.