Have you gone fully "PC-free"?

[Mad Mac Maniac]

Do you still sync your iPhone to your computer or do you only use iCloud? What do you see as the advantages to each?

Almost immediately after iOS 5 came out I went PC-free, opting to only sync through iCloud. My primary motivation for this was to free up room on my Mac. All 120GB of it was packed to the brim (thus was running very sluggishly), and somewhere around 25GB of it was entirely just iPhone app data and my iPhone backup, which is pretty much a complete waste of space. I was able to delete all that wasted app data, and my Mac thanks me for it.

I honestly don't ever manage things like music/photos on my iPhone, so I worried about any of that. But lately I have at least been noticing the limitations in those areas. It seems to be impossible to manage photos, music or anything really without syncing the ENTIRE contents of my iPhone (yeah all 20gb+ of apps) to my Mac. Correct me if there is some other way I'm not aware of...

So what do you do? Have you found something that works for you?

 

[lazard]

get a bigger hard drive.

 

[Want300]

I have no reason to go PC free since I use my computer so much already anyway. Plus, since I got a new MacBook Pro in December, I have a 750 GB HD built in, which is plenty of space for me.

 

[mattopotamus]

Not really PC-free since my contacts, calendar, and pretty much anything that IOS offers on a desktop syncs. I don't physically plug my phone into my PC anymore, but the cloud still loads data on my laptop

 

[Vege-Taco]

I've been PC-free for 6 years. It only gets better with time. I hate Windows so much....

Enable "Sync via WiFi" and you won't have to connect your cable to your computer anymore. In fact, you probably won't ever notice that synching happens anymore. It's quite transparent.

 

[teejer]

I have been PC free for a while now. And, I may well end up laptop/desktop free before too long -- I use my iPad and iPhone for almost everything. I use a wireless keyboard with the iPad for long typing sessions (emails and Facebook rants, mostly, with an occasional paper or report for work).

The only thing I really use my Macbook Pro for these days is a couple of websites that are clinging to flash, and using IRC to download files from a dog club that refuses to move into the 21st century.

 

[nburwell]

Very rarely do I connect my iPhone to my MBP. I sync it to iCloud each night while I'm sleeping. The only time I would foresee connecting my iPhone to my MBP is if I needed to restore the phone to it's factory settings.

 

[kyellowness]

not yet. Working towards it though.

 

[Spectrum Abuser]

I still sync with my computer. Not all of us have extremely quick cable connections to the world wide web. My DSL line can handle iCloud downloads/uploads reasonably don't get me wrong, but it's still that much quicker with local storage transfer.

Check back with me when everyone gets Gigabit fiber to the home connections.

 

[NewAnger]

I would sync via WiFi it was faster at syncing music. It takes too long. Also, iTunes Match is way too buggy right now to go that way. Tried it every few months and the same bugs exist.

 

[pblakk]

PC-free? No way... gotta have my Windows PC . Absolutely unsurpassed productivity, 6 year old laptop. Ordering a new one soon.

 

[applesith]

I USB my iPhone and iPad to MBP for syncing music and video. Also every week to a manual backup to itunes.

I do have back up to iCloud enabled, but you should have a relatively recent back to iTunes too in the event you have to do a fill restore.

My iPhone 4 died last week randomly (likely battery issue) and restoring all from iCloud took multiple attempts to my replacement iPhone. It would get hung up on apps randomly. Camera Roll was timing out too.

Also, check the size of your iCloud backups- my most recent was only a few hundred MBs and kept giving me "item cannot be restored" messages. Only going back to the full ~4GB backup actually started to work, but that was 2 weeks old and I lost a lot of txt messages and in-app data.

Routine backing up to iTunes FTW!