Coming home upon the professor’s early dismissal of class, I decided that the thirty minute drive between headquarters and the college campus should be appropriately followed up with a bit of app updating, Instapaper goodness, a podcast or two, and a well deserved nap. Hastily stripping off my dress shirt, I slipped into the comfort of my couch, propped the iPad against a knee, and immediately ventured into the iPod app. And immediately I was disappointed that I didn’t have the latest podcasts downloaded yet. Oh, the inconvenience of it all!

Aching knees still intact after climbing no less than six flights of stairs just forty five minutes earlier, I hobbled into the office and fumbled for that connect-cable-thing we still get with Apple mobile devices. In five minutes, my iPad had launched iTunes, backed up its wares and slurped down the latest podcasts through only the prettiest cable cluttering my shelf space. Yes, the cable saved the day, but consider me lazy: I shouldn’t even need the cable.

I’ve been wondering for a while when the heck Apple would finally bless us with wireless syncing - I imagine it can’t be that hard. And for a company hell bent on producing the greenest products with absolute minimum waste, you’d think the most wasteful thing Apple provides, the cable, would have been axed a while ago for something revolutionary. You don’t even need over-the-air syncing initially; Wi-Fi sync over local networks would be enough of a tease to keep us satisfied for a while.

Then there’s iTunes. I used to be in the camp of, “What’s wrong with iTunes?” Lately it’s been a glut. Why does iTunes contain i-apps? Why can’t I configure syncing options from the iPad? With Apple there’s this love hate relationship of, “Yeah, I understand they’re trying to keep things simple, but there needs to be some slight sacrifices for the sake of usability.” Don’t get me started on having to enter my iTunes Account password for free App updates.

I started thinking of lots ideas… maybe crazy ones. When I see the iPad backing up data to iTunes, I think: “Why can’t the iPad just automatically back up to the Time Capsule overnight?” When I have to plug in the iPad to iTunes to update a few podcasts, I think about how I can’t use a feature like Home Sharing with the iPad (negating the need to sync anything), or why I can’t use my iPad with my bedroom’s iHome speakers because of its lack of AirTunes. Or why can’t iTunes just talk to the iPad and say, “The Podcast listing between my database and your database is different: should I update? Okay.” Wi-Fi syncing begins as podcasts automatically get gulped down from a Mac desktop. If iTunes gets an App update, how come it just can’t push to all my devices that have it installed? It’s frustrating that I still have to use a cable and iTunes along with it to mediate everything.

If you’ve had the same questions and frustrations I’ve had, then you need not look closer than Apple’s latest iBooks app. If you have iBooks on your iPad and iPhone, books downloaded automatically get synced between devices without iTunes. Without a cable. If you’ve read up to page 32 on your iPad, you can resume on that page in a tiring office meeting via your iPhone. If we take this concept and apply it to music, just think about pausing the latest Cage the Elephant single on your iPad before leaving the house, plugging your iPhone into your car stereo, and resuming the same song. It’s this sort of automatic continuity of operation we expect in our daily lives. I think it’s a nod towards things to come.

Keeping music, podcasts, videos, movies, and other nonessential items in sync would be a pretty easy thing to do. It would be safe to assume that I’d want the same data across all the mediums. But the problem comes when we start getting applications into the mix. Consuming content is the easy part.

Settings and applications have to be managed. A camera application that requires the lens from an iPhone 4 would be meaningless on an iPad. Who is to say that a iPhone and iPad compatible game should be synced across both devices when I only want to play it on the iPad? Should settings from my iPhone be transferred to my iPad? Apple’s solution will have to give consumers some centralized control that’s able to effortlessly apply a provision of custom settings across all of your owned devices.

Many have been clamoring the “iTunes Cloud” that’s to be served up from the bowels of North Carolina would be the solution to all of this, and that maybe Mobile Me would be a crux somehow. We envision some web page that you can visit from anywhere where you can apply settings that take place across all of your owned Apple product (even your Shuffle and iPod nano). Like magic, content would be updated in a matter of minutes across your Mac, iPhone, iPods, iPads, and eventually the iTV. Music could be streaming down from the cloud wherever we were. I don’t know if what we’re hoping for would be rolled out immediately, but I think anyone who can put the words iTunes + Cloud together can come to the conclusion of “management over-the-air.”

So where the heck is wireless syncing? If Apple is going to remove the cable, they just might take the bloat of iTunes with it. We complain about the current state of affairs when it comes to managing our extra limbs, but just imagine the next step Apple is going to take in the process of syncing content. They aren’t going to just remove a cable; Apple isn’t planning on having us sync content between devices. They’re going to have us syncing to devices. There’s going to be some singular entity that we own in the cloud, where applications, music, and video can be automatically pushed, pulled, or streamed to our devices at any given time with minimal effort. We’re already halfway there, and we’re starting to see some of the effects of syncing between devices with an unseemly app like iBooks.

Apple’s wireless solutions are just outside of the box. We haven’t seen it yet, and it’ll be more thoughtful than trying to copy what others have done in syncing content between devices. Instead of asking why Apple hasn’t yet implemented these features, I say let’s observe where they’re going.