Yet Another Syncing Complaint (when are you going to get it right, Apple?)

Question

I have to say, syncing my phone with itunes is the most miserably frustrating techno-process in my life at the moment.
About to step out for lunch, I thought it'd be nice to grab a new audio book to accompany my sandwich and I to the park. I found a title and had it on my hard drive in under 90 seconds -- an impressively frictionless acquisition.
But then came time to go from computer to phone.
I click sync. Message: "Syncing will remove 30 applications including "Around Me" and others from your phone." Umm, why? Why 30? Why not all? Why any at all? No indication given. Okay, I don't care about the apps -- just the book for now -- so let's ignore the app's. I uncheck the 'Sync Apps' box. Message: "Not syncing your apps will remove all applications and their data from your iPhone." Are you <edited by host> kidding me? Where is the sanity in that? All I want you to do is LEAVE MY APPS ALONE. Instead, my options are lose 30, or lose all of them. Granted, there are probably ways to get them back after losing them, but all I want to do is go to lunch with my new book, not sit here and think long-term syncing strategy.
This is one of many examples of the absurd inflexibility of the iTunes<->iPhone relationship.
Another is the incessant backups that take 20 minutes. All I want to do is put a 200mb audio file on my phone and go to lunch. That should take less time than it took to download the file, not nearly two orders of magnitude more (after downloading the book, it took nearly 45 minutes to get my phone back to a usable state). Not only does the phone get backed up, but I notice that the syncing process includes transferring files that were ALREADY ON THE PHONE back to the phone.
Seriously, Apple? How is it that you can be so good at user experience EVERYWHERE ELSE and <edited by host> so hard at it here?
I'd say get a grip, but I'm not sure that's the message I want to send.
P.S. The fact that I'm this frustrated is obviously an indication of how otherwise invested I am in your products. It is indeed a love-hate relationship.

Answer 1

From the description I would assume you normally connect your iPod at home, but you made the purchase at work managed to connect to a different library that has the same content. Have you recently had to rebuild the library following a crash?
Apple have designed iTunes to associate the iPhone with a single library. When you connect it to a different library iTunes will want to erase all apps and media content (except the built-in apps) and replace them with stuff from the local libray. This happens even if you have the iPhone in manually manage mode and is different from the behaviour of earlier iPod models.
Alternatively you could have used the iTunes app on the iPhone to make your purchase, connecting to local wi-fi if necessary to download larger files. I often do this to acquire podcasts before leaving home/work just in case syncing takes longer than usual for some reason.
Alternatively, if my original guess was correct and you want to be able to update your iPhone from work, home, anywhere else you happen to be, it can be done with a portable clone of your library. See this thread:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11521077#11521077
tt2
Message was edited by: turingtest2