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Rodan52

macrumors 6502
Original poster
My wife regularly syncs and backs up her iPhone to her MBA. She uses the provided Apple USB-C to USB-C cable plugged directly into the port of the MBA, both devices are running the latest OS.

Every time she does this it stalls halfway requiring her to stop the process (a time consuming act in itself) eject the iPhone and start the process again. Initially the window shows the iPhone with the "barber pole" progress line for some time, up to 5mins. See below;

Screenshot 2025-06-10 at 14.04.06.jpeg

Then she receives this message;

Screenshot 2025-06-10 at 14.05.33.jpeg

The second time she tries it works, every time;

Screenshot 2025-06-10 at 14.06.12.jpeg
Yes, it did ask the "allow this accessory to connect" the first time she did this with the new MBA. She seems to be doing all of the right things, I've tried it myself with the same result.

It's turned what should be a set an forget process, like while your having a shower, into a long involved one requiring that she sit and wait for it to fail before aborting and trying again.

The tracks that the progress bar refers to in the sceen shots are Talking Books, as distinct from Audio Books (seperate app), these tracks are from an online subscription audio library and can only be added to Music, she does not sync her music so only those tracks are ticked in the Music app. Once synced the tracks playback perfectly. It worked fine before iTunes got split up into it's various components. The Audio Books app is now pretty much useless except for buying Audio Books from Apple.

I might add that this has been happening for some time even with her previous laptop, iPhone and earlier versions of macOS and iOS.

I feel like I've tried everything in the way of settings, cables, ports, performing a backup first, ect, ect all to no avail. I feel like I'm missing something completely unrelated but I could be wrong.

Any help would be greatly appreciated by us both.

Rod & Annie
 
Last time I synced with a Mac was probably over a decade ago.

Consider subscribing to iTunes Match - it’s $25/year and puts all her music in the cloud, accessible from any device. Combine that with iCloud Backup and iCloud Photos and kiss the USB cable & associated tasks goodbye.
 
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