I’ll probably be waiting awhile to replace my iPhone, but in the meantime I’ve got a whole new operating system to play with — iOS 7 on an iPhone 4S. (Yes, I skipped the iPhone 5.)
The new operating system looks great – I actually like the new “flat” look. Gone are the fake textures and shadows. I’ve also noticed a little more quickness in how some of the phone’s basic apps work. Mail, for example, seems to respond faster.
But I have noticed some glitches.
One isn’t really a glitch, it’s a change Apple made to the music player and I don’t like it at all. I use my iPhone as my primary music player in my car, and with more than a thousand songs loaded, I do lots of shuffling. Mostly, I choose a music genre and shuffle play from there.
The new iOS 7 apparently has gotten rid of that ability. I can no longer play from a genre. Now I have to create a new “smart playlist” on my computer and sync it to the phone — but that’s a problem (more on that in a second).
Building playlists is a little harder now. Used to be you could create a new list, and then select entire albums or artists to add in one swoop. Apparently, you can’t do that anymore – you have to select each song one at a time.
And there are syncing issues. This is a real glitch that a few others seem to be having as well. Syncing between the new iTunes computer software and the phone will not complete. It constantly hangs on the final step — “waiting for changes to be applied.” Rebooting, restarting, cycling the phone on and off, nothing fixes it. I’ve trolled the Internet far and wide and no one seems to have an answer yet.
I’m using the new version of iTunes on Windows 7, but this problem appears to be happening across different devices on both Macs and PCs.
Usually, I wait a couple of weeks before upgrading my phone’s software to give them a chance to fix the bugs, but this time I was impatient. I’ve learned my lesson… there’s nothing wrong with waiting a little while and let Apple catch and fix these nagging early-release problems.
ArcherVox 
This is a big problem and I find it weird that there isn’t much chatter about it on the net. I can no longer create a smart playlist on the phone thru iTunes and call it “hip hop” so that it will list all hip hop tracks that I manually added to my phone. I have to create the playlist on the Mac then drag it to my phone, which in turn drags all 3,000 hip hop tracks to the phone also. Yes, I know I can limit the list to so many songs, but then I don’t get to choose those songs. There is now the abiltiy to create a playlist on the iPhone itself, but like you said, it is very weak. This is a very annoying change that Apple better fix right quick!
You can play by genre, just go to genre pull down search for rock, hip hop, whatever then go from there, it don’t matter to me I DON’T HAVE ANY MUSIC “Waiting for changes to be applied”