Moving to my new iPhone 7

Hi all,

I moved from my old iPhone 6s to a new iPhone 7 last night a couple of hours before dinner out with people. It was a little risky but it worked out.  What made this different for me was that I had an Apple Watch, and I use - a lot - Apple Pay.  So that is why I am sharing this info - in case this is different for you too.

Here is an article on how to move to a new iPhone using either over the air (OTA) or via iTunes. It was not good enough for me so that explains why this article exists.

I have had most of the iPhone’s - not any of the Plus - and so I have worked out how to do this pretty good - at least until the Watch came along so I always to iTunes.

But here is what you should do:

• On your old phone unpair your watch.  Yes, do that.  It will do a backup.
• Now connect your old phone to iTunes and do an encrypted backup - make note of the password as you will need it later.
• Once the backup is done power off your phone and remove the SIM.
• Now add the SIM to the new phone,
• Power it on and go through the simple config.  When it says how to configure the phone select iTunes
• Connect the new phone to iTunes
• Now restore the phone using the backup you just did.
• The phone will run a little hot, but that is OK as it is working very hard right now.
• After the phone is restored you need to do a iTunes Sync with it.
• Again, the phone will run a little hot, but again that is OK.  It is restoring apps and rebuilding indexes.
• I was prompted to upgrade to 10.0.1 but I only did that after the rest of things were done.
• Your phone should be working after a total of about 1 or 1.5 hours.

What might be the bad news so far?  It turns out TripIt, Withings, and Evernote don’t preserve their passwords through this so you will need to log in again.  But the vast majority of apps are good and you don’t need to do anything and they work - for example here is a partial list of my apps - Tweetbot, Mail, Calandar, Ring, Piper, Canary, Slack, iPassword, Gaia, and Expensify.

Important note - while I have heard that no credit cards in Apple pay will be backed up and migrated to a new iPhone, I had exactly one of my cards migrated to the new iPhone.  I still had to enable / verify it.  So happy it was my AMX which is easy to do that with.  I had to add my other card after I was on the new phone and after that I had to enable it again on the Apple Watch.

Also, don’t forget you will need to connect to your car or GPS again since you have a new phone.

Now we deal with the watch.

• Using the Watch app go into pair mode,
• Point your phone at the watch,
• And when prompted pick the backup that was made when you unpaired.
• It will take a bit to get all the apps back to your watch but keep your phone and watch nearby and it will complete.

I suggest you use your phone until the battery dies.  It will die quicker than normal due to everything that is going on with it.  Once it is dead do a full charge and you should be good.  The battery will last longer than your old - in my case - 6s - iPhone.

The combination of iOS 10 and the iPhone 7 is pretty good.  I got use to the different style of home button quite quickly and I like it a lot. I have not seen for sure yet the longer battery life but I suspect I will soon.  And splash proof is quite nice.

What about my old phone? It is going to sit - powered off - in one of my desk drawers for a bit.  At some point I will power it up, disconnect or de-authorize with the iTunes store and do a hard reset so that nothing is left on it of mine.

Links

• Moving to a new iPhone - http://www.imore.com/how-to-transfer-data-from-old-iphone-to-new-iphone
• Moving from iPhone 6 to iPhone 6s - https://notesfrommwhite.net/2015/09/29/moving-from-iphone-6-to-iphone-6s/
• The iPhone 7 - very good review of the new phone - http://daringfireball.net/2016/09/the_iphones_7
• Everything new in iOS 10 - https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/13/everything-new-in-ios-10-new-ways-to-communicate-in-messages-lock-screen-widgets-redesigned-music-siri-apps-and-much-more/
• Competing with iPhone’s specs is harder than it seems - http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/12/12886058/iphone-7-specs-competition

Hope that this helps, and have a great weekend! BTW, if I did have that great dinner party out I was looking forward to this would have been done sooner.

Update:

• 10/2/16 - How to reboot, reset, or enter DFU mode - all a little different on an iPhone 7.  Find out how in this article.

Michael

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