Ok so with the launch of the MacBook Air, Apple claimed the future is without wires.

Now that i have an Air one of the frustrations is I have to sync via a cable. This is a problem, because like many people my itunes is to large to store on the hard drive. Mine is kept on a Lacie portable USB drive.

Of course with the Air, that causes a problem as the drive and the Ipod can not both plug into the one USB port. As a result I have a small Belkin powered USB hub . That however is really starting to defeat the purpose of the Air.

The question has to be, how long until the Ipod (or at least say the Iphone and the touch) start being able to sync wirelessly? This looks promising as a third party application, but really I suspect Apple could do this quite easily.

PS Sorry Brains I know you will hate the thought of something else happening wirelessly

It'll happen.... it's much faster to sync via USB2, but there's no technical reason that e.g. the iPod touch couldn't sync with .mac for your iCal and Address Book. With music and video, the file sizes are very large, and would take longer via wireless - but the convenience would be fantastic. The iCal and Address Book thing may not happen for some time on the iPhone/iPod Touch, due to the fact that resolving sync conflicts is tedious, and would not work very well on the touch interface. Music/Video is a one-way sync though, so that problem doesn't exist. Maybe it'll be in iPhone OS 2.0.

We can only hope

I'd love to just walk into the room and not have to worry about docking my iPod touch to get my new music for the day.

Now, power over WLAN...that would be cool!

*enters back to reality*

Doubt apple would implement it as people would not check that they have enough battery power to complete the operation. Not sure what happens when an iPod craps out halfway through a sync, but it may cause file structure issues and/or corruption. Maybe they could get around this by only letting you sync if you dock your iPod to a power supply, but then why not just dock it to your mac?

I guess the same could be said for having a power failure during sync on a desktop machine, but the chances of that happening are rarer than the millions of Touches/iPhones crapping out due to low battery.

I would like to see wireless sync of smaller things such as iCal/notes and email, maybe even supporting Airtunes would be a nice first step.

I would love to see the iPhone/touch syncing via dotmac. That would be a killer feature.

I don't think I'd want it for music/videos though as it would take forever. Although wirelessly updating smart playlists might be a killer feature once the initial transfers have been made.

Do you really think it would take that long (apart from the first ever sync) to do wirelessly? As to the first Sync that may need to be via wire, as a blank iPod would take a very long time to sync.

Video would take a while as it does take some time to sync a movie to Apple TV, however once the iPod is up and running the music/podcast sync should not be that big really I would have thought.

Perhaps just don't have wireless syncing for video (they exclude if from the ability to download now on the iPhone and Touch anyway).

My friend Phillip and I were discussing this exact topic the other day. How handy it would be to open iTunes, activated Bluetooth Sync and send songs straight to it. Sure, it will most likely be slower than a cable, but it will be much easier.

Anyway, I am sure Apple have already considered it but there might be some limitations restricting them from proceeding with this action.

EDIT: Would Wi-Fi be any faster for Syncing?

Bluetooth would be so slow it'd wouldn't really be possible. I typically get syncs around 100kbit a second over bluetooth. Thats roughly 40 seconds for a song, 400+ for a video. WiFi is much quicker but still much slower than USB... real life speeds of around 28mbits (802.11g) a second in comparison to 480mbit (USB) (slower in reality, but you get the idea) makes WiFi look very, VERY slow. Not to mention how much power it'd take to wirelessly sync...

From bash.org:
but on topic: Wireless syncing would be cool for the iPhone if it you could sync (and perhaps restrict wifi sync to such things) the following both ways: iCal events, Mail messages ( (I don't like the idea of IMAP for some reason), iChat Chats (c'mon... iChat mobile, PLEASE!) and Contacts. Now that I would find very useful and it wouldn't take too long either.

That's exactly the way MS did it with the Zune.