I had a vision, one vision, a clear and concise vision. Buy the latest iPhone, integrate everything into the Apple iCloud for that perfect seamless Apple eco experience.

So what could possibly go wrong? Read on….

The first step in this conquest for pure Apple cloud nirvana was making sure all my PIM data was updated on Apple iCloud. This was achieved by copying by Google contacts and PIM data into the iCloud equivalents. This worked rather well.

Next was to turn on iCloud Photo library from my mac and have a full copy of my photos up in the Apple Cloud. This didn’t work initally. This was solved only by visiting an Apple store and using their wifi to upload. It also took ages.

The iCloud Photo experience hasn’t improved. I have now had to turn this feature off on my iPhone 6S Plus and just use photostream. The problem is caused by my upload speed being too slow versus the constant flow of new photos. I also manually connect my iPhone 6S and sync photos. I still have a copy of my photos with Apple iCloud and will continue to do so as I like the structured folders and overall integration. This isn’t working though. Duplicates are appearing all over the place. And some can’t be removed.

So next job was to subscribe to iTunes Match and Apple Music. This has been a total disaster beyond belief. Whilst Apple has been offering accessible support, it has left me in a position of 10% of my iTunes library ruined. Apple support left me after several support calls in a greater disaster.I now had around 41 drm protected tracks which were not drm in the first place, and still 10% of my music library lost by using Apple’s Cloud services. If it was not for my quick thinking, the number of DRM protected tracks would have increased 5 times. I would stress, these issues were not caused by my human hands but Apple and or their iCloud services.

So my issues are far from over. Apple are continuing to see what they can do to recover my music library.

To be continued…..

So 36 hours later since first writing this post, and it was worded somewhat stronger in version 1.

Mossy, from Apple Senior support, last night via remote access and some pure genius, salvaged all my iTunes music and video library and that now syncs perfectly with my iPhone 6S Plus. Local backups on Time Machine!

Except now Photos on my MacBook still does not tally with Photos on my iPhone. Grrrr. Another call later and this is the position.

I have duplicate photos on my iPhone, not on my MacBook. I am running iOS 9.02 and El Capitan on my MacBook.I now have turned off iCloud Photo library as I don’t trust what its doing to my devices. I might turn on My Photostream, but its off for the moment. I have several unresolved issues that will take another evening to get sorted or maybe not.

BUT I have a question that I hope somebody can answer. I want to understand the behaviour of the iPhone and MacBook syncing via lightning cable. It seems that if I take a lovely photo of say 4mb or a panorama of 18mb in file size, after syncing back to my iPhone its only just over 1.4mb. Is this normal behaviour? Can the option for full resolution photo synced be left on? Or do I have a fault somewhere?

THEN if I went back and used iCloud Photo library cloud services, it appears you can have the whole full resolution photo downloaded on to your iPhone or a lower resolution. This also means having to pay Apple for a higher cloud storage. But using your own lightning cable and MacBook it appears you cannot do this.

In my opinion this does not appear right unless I am missing a setting somewhere.

Update 2 – I have decided to turn on iCloud Photos again on all devices, and give it another shot. I really need this to work, as it turns out this will be the key way to ensure I get the high res versions on my selected devices.