My “Mobile Applications” folder contains 924 items, weighing a whopping 18.78 GB. iTunes only lists 920 apps, so something is out of sync already.
Obviously, I do not use that many apps. My iPhone 4 only has 163, and I could delete many of those as I don’t use them. My father’s iPad, which uses my Apple ID to get apps so that he doesn’t have to purchase the same ones I have already paid for, has about 250, most of them being games he tried once or twice and left there.

I’m about to phase out my glorious 2006 iMac in favor of a new Mac Mini and I’m going to just move the iTunes Library folder; this way, everything is retained and I don’t have to convince a brand new iTunes not to nuke the iPhone and iPad just because they have been synced to a different machines. As for the music itself, I could also use iTunes Match to carry it over, but I’d rather just drop the folder in and be happy about it. The point is that I really don’t want to waste about 20 GB on the new computer for apps I honestly don’t care about.

The most immediate method, deleting the apps from iTunes, kind of works… except that if you delete an app that’s used on your device, it will be removed from that device upon syncing. The proper way to do this would be to manually delete from iTunes the ones you’re not using. There’s a little problem with that: there is absolutely no way of knowing whether any local app is being synced to any device or not, unless you manually check whether every single app is on any of your devices. This sounds dreadful enough with my iPhone, with which I’m very familiar; doing it with my father’s iPad sounds like a nightmare.

Thankfully, after a little searching, I found the way to do it in a much easier fashion. Of course, if you follow these instructions and you delete important data or things like that, I’m not responsible. Do this at your own risk.

I’m using iTunes 10.7 on OS X 10.7 Lion, but it should be the same on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. When iTunes 11 is released in a few days or weeks, it’s probably going to be much different.

The first, very important thing to do is to disable automatic syncing. To do this, open iTunes’s preferences, go to Devices, and check Prevent iPods, iPhones and iPads from syncing automatically. You can do this even when your device is not connected, but I recommend doing this when it’s already connected so it’s even less likely that something goes wrong.
After you’ve made sure that the new device does not start to sync automatically, go ahead and run a full backup, just in case something goes wrong. Find your device in the sidebar, right click on it, and choose Back Up. It will take a while.
After it’s done backing it up, it’s time to rock and roll.

Click Apps in the the Library section of the side bar, and either choose Select All from the Edit menu, or hit Command-A on your keyboard. Now all your bazillion apps will be selected. You can either delete them, which I do not recommend, or you can move them to a folder. With all of them selected, just drag them into a folder you previously created with the Finder to make a manual backup of all of them. Again, it will take a while. Once all the files are safely copied, you can delete them: just press backspace on your keyboard, or choose Delete from the Edit menu. At this point your may get a scary message warning you that the apps will be deleted from all devices to which they had been copied. Confirm the deletion and move to trash; that’s why you just copied them out.

Now, here’s the nice part. With your device still connected, right click on its name in the sidebar and choose Transfer Purchases. You may be asked for your Apple ID password, and iTunes will make a local copy of all the apps that are currently on your device.
Rinse and repeat for any other extra device, and you’re done: at the end you will only have a local copy of the apps that you currently have on your devices.

If you want to be extra sure that everything has been copied correctly, you may want to run Transfer Purchases again for each device. At the end, you can safely re-enable automatic syncing. If you start the syncing procedure immediately, it should not copy (nor delete!) any apps in any direction, meaning they are already synchronized.

At this point, if you want, you can delete the backup folder you had copied your apps to when you began this whole ordeal. I’d suggest keeping them on a backup disk just in case, but unless the apps are pulled from the App Store, you can safely download them again at no extra cost at any time.

Personally, I ended up recovering about 13 GB by doing this. Not bad, considering that from my point of view those 13 GB were filled with pointless fluff!

This leads me to think that these new units may require iOS 4.1 at minimum, and the new firmware could therefore be made available to iPhones (and older generations of iPod Touches — ok now that’s a weird plural) on the same day.

Of course, the new units may be shipped with a particular version that won’t be made available to other devices, as it was with the iPad: iPhone OS 3.2 was never made available for iPhones, and iPads won’t see iOS 4 until the fall. Apple may also release iOS 4 for iPad on Wednesday, or give a release date. Or perhaps introduce iPad 2 whilst lowering the price of the current iPad, probably giving a refund to angry customers (it has already happened with the original iPhone.) Besides, Apple would get to use the line they love so much: our competitors are still trying to copy version 1, and we have already released version 2.

Personally, I don’t care what new hardware is on the horizon. I just want iOS 4.1 for the iPhone and I want it to make my 3G decent again.

I happen to live in the Province of the Empire, in a country I oftentimes call “the third world of technology.” No way to rent movies online – or through the mail, for that matter –, no Pandora.com or Last.fm to easily find new music (the latter is available on a paid-membership basis; the former is simply forbidden), no iBooks when the iPad comes out, and so on. I live in Italy.

I am also a happy Mac and iPhone user. Not an evangelist, not anymore at least: I will praise how durable and enjoyable Apple products are, but I won’t urge anybody to buy them. I will, however, talk about them to people who ask me. After close to ten years as a Mac user (I do remember MacOS 9.2 and MacOS X 10.0) and years of previous experience with Linux systems, Apple has become an invaluable provider of my daily computing. OS X allows me tinker with the underlying UNIX system with ease while being extremely user-friendly with the rest of the user interface. As a web developer, it’s the closest thing to perfection I can think of.

When the iPad was announced, I was following Steve Jobs’s keynote through Engadget. I gradually turned from skeptic to disappointed: what, a big iPhone? A few hours later, a friend of mine summarized such feelings as: “I was hoping for a laptop replacement, and he just announced a tray. An iTray.”

A few days later, however, an article on a blog shone light on the matter: most of us computer people probably wouldn’t have much for a device like that. I’d personally much rather use my 13-inch MacBook Pro rather than an iPad, as it’s a full-fledged computer onto which I can install any program I want, with which I can multitask and that has a physical keyboard. I do sometimes use my MBP on the sofa, and while I agree that it’s not the most perfect experience, I’m willing to trade comfort for power.

People who do not have complex computing needs, though, will love the iPad. Take my father: he inherited the last PC I used, a glorious machine based on an AMD Duron 850 MHz CPU and 512 MB of memory. It runs Windows XP, and it’s far exceeded its time. Components keep breaking, and they are becoming hard to find. Every replacement has to be second-hand, and considering the higher price compared to current parts, it’s probably best to just ditch the machine entirely and build a new one. That was the plan, until the iPad was announced.

See, my father isn’t very computer-savvy. In fact, all he does is using Firefox to browse the web and little more. He doesn’t even care about productivity suites, he just reads a few online newspaper, peeks at The Daily Kitten, browses YouTube and visits the occasional website that he might hear about. He doesn’t even use email, in fact his email address is forwarded to mine so any messages he might receive from his bank will be taken care of. Also, since his computer started acting very flaky, he barely turns it on at all; and he doesn’t like sitting at the desk for long, and has no intention of learning how a computer works, therefore he is often confused by the interface.

Here are the three alternatives:

1. he can spend about €350 for a new PC that will be possibly left to dust
2. he can spend about €550 for a Mac Mini that will also be possibly left to dust and which will require him to get used to OS X
3. he can spend no less than €450 for a cheap laptop whose battery will last a couple of hours and which will have a learnng curve to be climbed
4. he can spend some €450 for the smallest iPad available (I think that that’s the pricing it will get in Europe), which he can use on his sofa, outside and anywhere else there is a wirless network, and that will take little time to get used to

He has also been saying that he wants a digital frame – and that kind of scares me, considering that I have 40 GB worth of pictures and that I will be the one who has to go through them with him – and that’s something else that an iPad might double as.

The iPad is, effectively, a closed environment. Users cannot install anything they want on it, and Apple can censor and refuse any content it doesn’t see fit. In return, the experience is smooth and without hurdles. What works, works; what doesn’t work, just doesn’t work. Those of us who see that as a threat to freedom should talk with computer illiterates. They would be amazed at how many people are perfectly fine with the concept of “you just can’t, period.” For them, even the simple lack of multitasking can be extremely beneficial; and that applies to some of “us” too.

Even tinkerers like me can be perfectly fine with closed systems, once the “threat to freedom” argument is put aside. I have been using an iPhone 3G since September 2008, and aside from minor annoyances, it’s served me very well. Sure, it would be great to have a wifi stumbler with GPS tracking support, but I can live without it. Also, tethering has been finally enabled with my cellular operator, so that’s not an issue anymore for me. And while the lack of multitasking can be annoying at times, the increase in battery life allows me to get over it. Of course, everyone has different needs, and I certainly do not question that; but that’s why there are alternatives.

For instance, I have read complaints by people who bought iPods and were extremely disappointed to see that they needed to install iTunes on Windows, or were just out of luck when using Linux. I think that such complaints are petty, pointless and naïve: the fact that you haven’t made any research prior to purchasing a product does not mean that the product is mediocre. The real problem is that your workflow isn’t flexible enough to fit said product, whether by choice  (“I don’t want to install iTunes”) or by need (“there is no iTunes for Linux”.) But that’s a problem with your workflow, not a problem with the product. The good news, however, is that there are plenty of other MP3 players that can be mounted as if they were USB drives and will read any files that are copied onto them. And they’re also cheaper than iPods!

The same applies to music: songs can be purchased from many online stores other than the iTunes Store, and they will play just the same. If you are old-style like me, you can also still buy physical CDs, with a printed booklet and whatnot.

Some commenters are astonished that the same people who bash Microsoft have a different attitude towards Apple. That may be true – Microsoft has a history of forcing their products onto the computer industry at large, whilst Apple’s influence is recent and limited to specific media industries –, but the truth is that even the most bitter anti-Microsoft people eventually grow up and take up a healthier “live and let live” attitude: I do not need Windows, I don’t use it; OpenOffice perfectly replaces anything I might need to do with Office; and so on.

Now, if Apple manages to modernize the press industry, then it’s certainly good for them. Rest assured that DRM won’t last long: media is bound to be globalized, and I am confident that in a few years producers will realize that they will make much more money by allowing everyone on the planet to buy their movies/songs/books without resorting to artificial boundaries; pecunia non olet, said the Romans. By the time a movie is released in another part of the planet, those who were waiting for it might as well have gotten it illegally: why not cash that money?

And incidentally, Apple is often an innovator. It was the first company to believe in mass-distribution of music over the ‘net, and many others followed suit; it was the first to believe in having computers with only USB ports (the glorious iMac); it was the first to provide the masses with a usable graphical user interface (Windows 1, released two years later, was little more than MS-DOS with a colored border around the screen); and so on. Who knows what will happen with Light Peak…