Clearly Apple’s PR Skynet saw my recent whining about the MacBook Pro and engage in virtual retribution, because now my iPhone is failing.

I used Apple’s excellent data migraiton program to copy my data from my old MacBook Pro to the new one. After the transfer, the first time I tried to sync with iTunes between my new Mac and my iPhone, iTunes informed me that I could not activate the DRM because I’ve used all five of my machine authorizations. I had already put the old MacBook Pro away so I decided to deal with this later. I interrupted the iPhone sync-in-progress just as it started to avoid issues with the third-party applications and music on my phone.

Things worked well for quite a while. Then, three days later, I noticed that when I tried to launch a third-party app (actually, Apple’s own Remote application), it crashed right away. And that, in fact, every third-party app crashes after launch, but the built-in apps continue to work.

I’ve since discovered this is a fairly common problem with iPhones. I’ve rebooted the phone and hard-rebooted the phone (you know, holding down the front button and the top button) many times, authorized iTunes and synced, de-authorized iTunes and synced, downloaded new free third-party apps via iTunes and synced (to try and trigger the DRM to reset), downloaded new apps via the iPhone, removed and re-downloaded several of my apps at random, wiped the iPhone and restored from a backup, removed all my apps via iTunes and synced (losing all my data, some of which wasn’t synced with other services and I’ve no idea how to restore the data back), and then added them back via iTunes and re-synced, and yet, after all this, the problem still persists.

I guess I’m off to the Apple store to fix the problem, but geez, I really don’t have time this week to deal with all this. Have I missed anything? I’ve scoured the forums and I seem to have tried everything.