If you follow me on twitter or see me in day-to-day life you know I had “some” problems with my iPhone5. But I did not want to upgrade to iPhone6, I rather waited for iPhone7. Just to give you an idea briefly: the battery needed to be recharged 4-5 times per day (42% meant that no point trying to use Sports Tracker or see your emails too often, the phone will die in less than an hour), the phone gets hot every now and then, the Wi-Fi was not working well and those problems forced me to reboot the phone at least 2-3 times a day and so on. I am sure you already understand how frustrated I was…
A bit more than a month ago one evening my iPhone stopped working, totally. I was just about to go to the gym but… I need my phone in my work so an option not having a phone tomorrow was not an option and going to gym without being able to use Sports Tracker…no… So I really had no other option but to try to recover the phone…
I was really lucky: I had a backup from that morning. The backup was in our office and I was at home so the first thing was to drive to the office and find the backup. Then the recovery started. It was reaaaally slow. By the estimation of iTunes I knew it will take hours… I decided to go for a run while it is recovering. I was wearing my iWatch for the run. It took me 7 hours to complete the recovery (not the run 😀 ). It was early in the morning when I finally had my iPhone working again (thank you, thank you, I was so happy about it) and then the phone decided to reset my watch and update the data. What I learned during this exercise was that the phone is the master and the watch is the slave. What does that mean? My running was gone! Like I never run. The watch never had a chance to tell the phone about my run before the phone erased my watch.
But never mind, everything else was recovered and I had my phone and watch working again. I was really tired in the office, but happy 🙂
I was in San Francisco when the new iPhone came out but immediately heard they run out from the stock. I did not want to wait anymore so I told my elder son to order me one to home. It took several weeks (4?) to arrive and of course it arrived while I was travelling in Poland. When I returned home I was too busy to start setting up the new phone, especially since I already learned it is not a job I can do in a minute… Last evening (during a meeting) I decided it is the time to start using the new phone…
Just a note: I had three top level IT experts in the room (one dba and two developers) plus my elder son who is very smart with technology so please do not even think for a second “there you see when a woman is trying to be technical”…
First I plugged the phone to my computer (which had the backup of my previous phone). The iTunes told me the iTunes version I have is too old for my new phone and must be updated. Ok, let’s update. After a while it tells me the signature for iTunes is faulty and therefore it cannot be updated. What next? Google. The advice I found was simply install the new version, do not update. Ok, I did that. Now the iTunes is saying “cannot connect to Heli’s iPhone5”. What? Why do you want to connect to iPhone5? The sim is already on the new one and the new phone is connected to iTunes, the backup should be in this computer. Think! OK, got it, the screen of the iPhone7 is locked (insert the pin) and iTunes calls it Heli’s iPhone5 because of the backup. Here we go, backup restored in not too long. But what about my iWatch? It looks happy and working but no messages showing up on the screen. Yeah right you need to pair it with the new phone. But how to do it?
We all try but we have no idea how to do it. Google. Then I understand I must reset the watch (that is scary, it tells me that all the data will be gone but I already learned it last time that the data on my watch is useless and the phone always wins so ok) and do the pairing. Next thing (surprise) is that the phone tells me the software on my watch is too old and must be updated. Ok, do it. I wait, I wait, I wait… I finally go to bed.
Now it’s the next morning and it is still not ready. I started the pairing again…
This morning I was luckier than Mark Rittman (https://medium.com/mark-rittman/the-story-behind-the-ikettle-the-eleven-hour-struggle-to-make-a-cup-of-tea-and-why-it-was-all-769144d12d7#.vme8k1ybp): I was able to have my coffee, oatmeal and rye-bread while waiting for my “iThings” to start working. I was able to read my emails and follow social media with my laptop. So I really cannot complain, except that I do not have an extra 2h in a morning for this. I remember the times when the phones just worked and starting to use a new phone was easy. I miss those days! I solve technical problems as part of my work but I DO NOT WANT to solve problems with my phone or my watch. I simply want them to work…
Now, 2h later, my phone says it is not able to find updates for the watch and asks me to start over… Great! Have a wonderful day! I might continue in the evening or I might stop using my iWatch…let’s see…
Cheers,
Heli
P.S. I do not give up easily…trying one more time. The error message was not an error message but saying all is good now and you can start pairing your phone and watch. At least I hope so… Dear Apple, please work on your wording, you make our life very hard now. Missleading error messages are a pain! I left home too late because of this mess but with both the phone and the watch, and both working.