FYI: Ping is a remarkably bad tool to gauge the accuracy of remote time source. What is the delay value from "ntpq -p"
I highly doubt that Apple's time servers are your best bet for time synch. Use the pool.ntp.org servers, preferabbly with your country code: e.g. us.pool.ntp.org, ca.pool.ntp.org.
My ntpq -p output:
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
==============================================================================
time.apple.com .INIT. 16 u - 512 0 0.000 0.000 0.000what happens if you change your time server to us.pool.ntp.org? (Substitute your country code for "us".)
Preferably you should have more than one server. The ntp reference implementation on osx is a little goofy because of the GUI configuration. But I think if you put us.pool.ntp.org,us.pool.ntp.org,us.pool.ntp.org for the server your computer will try to spin up three ntp connections. Atleast three, never two...
"A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure."
Close, but not quite; ntpd appears to be smart enough to realize you have three identical "server" lines in ntp.conf, and collapses them. Try this instead:
1.us.pool.ntp.org,2.us.pool.ntp.org,3.us.pool.ntp.org
Changing "us" to your country code, of course. Just tested, and it appears to produce the desired behavior.
Try editing /private/etc/ntp.conf and append:
# use multiple ntp servers
server us.pool.ntp.org iburst
server us.pool.ntp.org iburst
server us.pool.ntp.org iburst
<removed NTP stuff>
I simply don't have any clocks that aren't part of electronic devices, my wristwatch being the exception (but it's analog (Roman numerals, even :P) and only has second accuracy anyway, so I don't fuss about it).
Simply put, all my devices take care of all this for me. My MacBook and Windows 7 work desktop are both configured to sync to the Apple NTP servers (lowest ping for me, AND they're always up. Microsoft's are down a good 10% of the time in my experience). My cell phone gets its signal from God knows where (iPhone 4S - it could technically be using one of 4 different sources) but is always more or less in sync with the rest (I just checked with time.is for what little that is worth, however, and while my MacBook says that my time is within the margin of error "The difference from Time.is was -0.007 seconds (±0.018 seconds).", my iPhone returns "Your clock is 0.5 seconds slow" - but I would trust my iPhone's NTP implementation over time.is' response as its the same OS X NTP that got it "right" on my MacBook) as it can theoretically use a) GPS b) GSM/CDMA towers c) NTP d) time from PC sync.
All my other electronic devices fall in the same category. Garmin nüvi (GPS), Kindle (NTP, auto configured), Cisco IP Phone (NTP, manually configured), Brother printer (NTP, manually configured). I purposely do not set my microwave clock because a) I'll never get it right, and b) any time the power cuts, it resets and in 2012 they're still too stupid to add a 5 cent battery to keep the time in case of power outage.