.Mac sync fail silently

I have two Macs and use (the too expensive) .Mac service to keep AddressBook, iCal and Keychains synced. A few times the last weeks I noticed that things where not totally in sync, but I didn’t examine it further.

But today I went into System Preferences and started a sync manually. .Mac then gave an error message saying my client was to old to use for syncing. That’s fine, but why didn’t it tell me this the first time syncing failed? I don’t know how long I have been without backup. I have been lagging behind on OS X updates since the machine has been working fine. When I installed 10.4.11 .Mac sync started working again. But it shouldn’t have failed silently. So if you use .Mac syncing - check it!

If it is important enough, Apple will pre-announce

“We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.”

– Steve Jobs, pre-announcing the iPhone SDK

So why not:

“We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on a kick-ass, modern Java on Leopard.”

– how Steve Jobs should announce Java 6 for MacOS X