Tip for those using iTunes with the iPhone

By Toonhead, 23 February, 2014

Forum
Windows

Hi. I want to give a good tip for those folks who have just gotten new iPhones, or have very little experience with them. Again some of you will read this and probably say something along the lines of, "hello exactly!" But keep in mind that the situation I'm about to describe is one I'd never seen before, even though I'm a pretty experienced iOS user. When plugging in your new iPhone to your pc for the very first time, be sure to plug it *directly* into the pc's USB port, and not a USB hub. A friend of mine did this and lets just say the results afterwords were disasterous. At the time, I had no idea she had done this, and after updating her phone to iOS 7.0.6 it failed miserably. So after a lot of swearing and obtaining a little sighted help to verify exactly what was going on, we got an apple tech support rep on the phone, keep in mind guys this was on a Saturday night at around 8:30 eastern time or so, I'm glad those guys work nights! Anyways, he instructed my friend to plug the phone into a standard USB port and the phone went into recovery mode and finished the update process. I had to set up her phone again and pair all her accessories like her keyboard and speaker, but all went well after that. We also had to call her local Verizon store to activate her phone. I was under the impression that you could activate it over Wi-Fi or cellular, but the process didn't work as expected. Overall it was pretty stressful, I'm not going to sugar coat things and say everything was perfect. It was a pretty bumpy process but we were able to get her some apps and get everything else set up so it had a happy ending. I just wanted to pass along that little tip so new iPhone users wouldn't have the same issues.

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Comments

By Clare Page on Friday, February 21, 2014 - 21:28

Hi! Although I'm not a new iPhone user, I think it's good that you posted this tip about activating a new iPhone with iTunes. However, I would like to point out that, once the phone is activated, and authorised to sync to a particular computer, syncing the iPhone to the computer with iTunes works through a USB hub. I only got a hub recently, but I have had no problems syncing my iPhone with my PC since then. Having said that, I will remember the tip posted above, in case I decide to activate my next iPhone through iTunes.

By Toonhead on Friday, February 21, 2014 - 21:28

Very good point there! I've heard of other folks syncing with a hub, just be sure not to use one with major updates or it could crash the phone. In retrospect I think next time I help a friend get their iPhone set up, I'll do the update over-the-air.