Moving to my new iPhone 8

Hi all,

I moved from my old iPhone 7 to a new iPhone 8 last night.  I use an Apple Watch, and I use - a lot - Apple Pay so wanted to make sure I had no trouble with either.  So that is why I am sharing this info - in case this is different for you too or if you find it useful or helpful.

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, and I have always used iTunes.

But here is what you should do:

• Apply any of the updates your iPhone.
• 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.  You may be offered an option to setup by holding your new phone near an iPad or iPhone that is yours.  I had troubles with it - BTW, the problem I had was encrypted backup was incompatible.  So continue without doing that.  However, if you start that way, thinking you will continue with iTunes, and it fails - as it did for me - then use the Restore (not the Restore Backup) option in iTunes that put the phone back to reset and puts the latest iOS on it.  Then continue.
• Connect the new phone to iTunes.
• Now restore the phone using the backup you just did.
• You will / may need to do some small things like Touch ID, credit cards in Apple Pay, and iCloud.  I 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.
• In a recent iTunes update you don’t sync apps any longer.  But rather update / install only via the cloud or the App store.  I didn’t complain about that, but, for moving to a new phone that sucks.  Will take longer since you cannot sync apps locally from your iTunes but rather all has to download.
• Again, the phone will run a little hot, but again that is OK.  It is restoring apps and rebuilding indexes.
• Your phone should be working after a total of about 2 hours. YMMV due to the number of apps you have but I have a fair number and all are downloaded via Wifi.

What might be the bad news so far?  It turns out TripIt, 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, Calendar, Ring, Piper, Canary, Slack, iPassword, Gaia, WhatsApp and Expensify.  BTW, you will need to connect your old phone number that WhatsApp knows to this new phone.  But quick and easy and nothing lost.

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 (such as all the new indexing).  Once it is dead do a full charge and you should be good.

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
• The iPhone 8 - very good review of the new phone - https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-8-and-8-plus,review-4675.html
• iPhone 8 is World’s Fastest Phone - https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-8-benchmarks-fastest-phone,review-4676.html
• iOS 11 Review: Smarter, better, faster, bolder - https://www.imore.com/ios-11

Updates

• I talked with Evernote on a different issue, but I mentioned about how each upgrade - for years - I had to re-enter the Evernote password.  After some investigation they confirmed that is not supported to happen.  The password should persist.  They asked next upgrade, it it occurs again, for a screen recording and activity logs.  Yikes - where do I get those?

Michael

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