The purchase of new technology is always a carefully planned event in our household. Except for the cordless phone I bought Christmas Eve, but that’s another story. So the planned replacement of my beloved iphone 4S was a project management giant of a job. Having selected the iPhone 6 (not the 6 Plus) with 64Gb of memory, the space grey colour and even the Book Book case to put it in, all that remained was for Apple to deliver on time. Which they did.
Now, no, this isn’t a "John’s got a new iPhone" story. It’s about the process, I swear.
The game plan involves Daughter number 2 getting my old 4S to replace her 3GS (it’s always the middle child that gets the oldest phone, so I’m told) and me getting the 6, doh! But the story here is how I upgraded both of us. For Daughter, I opted for the backup and restore method, which I’ve used before with great success. But for me, I thought I’d try the “New iphone” route. Just give me a minute to explain.
So the 3GS was connected via USB cable to my Daughter’s Mac and iTunes opened. Then selecting the iPhone, hit Backup in the manual backup section. Easy. Slow, but easy. Then ejected. Before I handed over my old 4S, I hit Erase from the general settings. This wipes the lot. So when we plugged it into her Mac, it was a new iPhone again, but we selected Restore from backup and chose the backup we had just done. A few minutes later, all good to go. She did have to enter the PIN and the iTunes password and get her SIM replaced, but other than that, all good to go. Then the 3GS got erased and I’m not sure where that is going.
On to mine. Put the SIM in, boot the phone and follow the prompts. Give it the wifi password, the iTunes password, the iCloud password. No USB cable, no iTunes. That’s right, I have not been anywhere near iTunes.
From the App Store, I Installed;
1Password
Evernote
Messenger
Speedtest
and Hudsons
(There were a few other apps, but nothing worth mentioning here)
As we had previously bought these apps, they were all free downloads. No money spent.
The nasty bit is setting up the email. I have multiple email accounts and each one needed to be set up again. Luckily I have 1Password to remind me of all the dreaded passwords and Bingo! New phone.
All the data lives in the cloud, so my photos, music, emails, notes etc all came back automatically. Easy.
In part two, I’ll compare the time taken and the effort with the benefits. Stay tuned.