Hello there,
I have not written this sort of thing down before, in particular when an Apple Watch is involved. So here is what worked for me (and yes, I do use the iTunes connected method as I believe that is most reliable and even faster too).
- Make sure that the old iPhone is fully charged
- Make sure the Apple Watch is fully charged
- First make sure you have one Cloud backup, and most important, have an encrypted iTunes backup (info here). Make sure to have your encrypted backup password handy.
- Have your Cloud account credentials handy
- Make sure your iPhone is at 9.0.1 and all apps are updated.
- Unpair your Apple Watch. Be aware that it does do a backup before it does this.
- Now move your chip from the old phone to the new.
- Now start your new iPhone and only go as far as necessary to select iTunes. Don’t worry about Wifi.
- Do a restore.
- Do fingerprint(s).
- Now you will need to do the 9.0.1 upgrade, yes the iPhone 6s showed up with iOS 9.0.
- Now you should have an app restore occur. It will not happen – at least for me, until I enter my iTunes account info, then it worked fine.
- Now pair your watch. Make sure it works!
- You will now have to add your Security Code to your credit cards in the Wallet.
- Wipe your old phone now – even if you are going to keep it, wipe it, and rename it (more info). Confirm it is removed from managed devices – you can see that on iCloud.
Things I noticed:
- 1Password had to be told to use iCloud again but that took only a minute and all was good – nothing lost or confused. I did have to re – enable Touch ID support as well.
- Withings needed to be logged into again – not sure why the credentials were not restored. Plus, it needed the gadget – in this case blood pressure monitor – re connected to Bluetooth. Again sort of easy once you figured it out!
- Canary did not work. It opens to a black screen. I had to delete it from my iPhone, and install it again. Then log in again. I am becoming less and less happy with Canary.
- Tripit needed to be logged in again.
- My email, calendar, Evernote, Tweetbot, Expensify, Piper, Slack, Gaia, all worked fine. No need to re-enter credentials or configuration. Which of course makes sense as I did an encrypted backup!
Hope that this helps, and BTW, it was quite a quick process except for the second restore – which was of the apps – that took maybe 15 – 20 minutes but your mileage will vary depending on how many apps you have.
Update:
- 10/6/15 – just realized there is something important to remember when you move to a new iPhone. You car or GPS connections will not work. The new Bluetooth MAC address after all. So, don’t forget to repair as necessary.
- 10/4/15 – I push people to use encrypted backups due to most of your passwords will be part of it. But, I also learned here that it will also include your Health data as well. So another reason to use encrypted backups!
Michael
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