My iPhone 7 has served well, but it’s falling behind on updates now and the battery is…finicky…so it was about time for an upgrade, and I picked up a shiny new iPhone 16 Pro today. Expensive, but when you only upgrade every, uh, nine years, the cost-over-time’s not so bad.
Setting it up was not without some difficulties, though. I wanted to do a backup of the iPhone 7 first, but the options were limited. They really want you to back up to iCloud, but nah, I’m not putting all my phone’s data in the cloud. The other option is to back up to a computer, which is what I had been doing before, but the laptop I previously used for that no longer worked, and I didn’t have a cable that would allow my new(er) laptop to connect to the phone; the laptop only has USB-C and I only had a USB-2-to-Lightning cable. Fortunately, I also got a multiport adapter when I got the new phone, which allowed me to set up a USB-C -> USB 2 -> Lightning connection to the phone.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work very reliably. I could see the phone in Finder, and start a backup, but within a couple minutes it would always fail with an error about the phone being disconnected. I thought it might have been the phone going into lock mode, but even setting it to stay open permanently didn’t help. I guess going through the multiport adapter introduces some kind of flakiness or incompatibility? *shrug* I wasn’t about to spend $25 for a brand-new USB-C-to-Lightning cable that I’d use exactly once and never again, though. In the end I wound up doing the backup on my Windows 10 gaming PC. Not where I’d prefer to keep that data, but at least the backup worked perfectly the first time, even if it did mean installing ye olde iTunes.
With the old phone backed up, I could then start the phone-to-phone transfer, and that actually went pretty smoothly, using the Quick Start that comes up when you use the new phone for the first time. The only things that didn’t carry over were some authenticator apps. Some of those I could restore from the cloud, others I’ll have to manually switch while I still have access to the app on the old phone.
But there was a slight hiccup here, too: moving the phone number over. It tries to as part of the migration, but for some “incompatibility” reason it couldn’t do it automatically with my old phone. Bringing up the Telus app on the old phone and using a “Migrate your SIM” option gave me some choices on how to do it, but it took some trial-and-error. The option to transfer the SIM to an Apple device took me to a page with a bunch of instructions that only work if the old phone is still a relatively recent model. The option to transfer the SIM to an eSIM QR code voucher seemed promising, since the new phone can use eSIMs, but it wanted me to buy a voucher, with a delivery time of 5-10 days…wait, what? It apparently would have sent me a physical card in the mail with a QR code on it. That seems…unnecessary, besides there being a postal strike going on at the moment. But upon revisiting the first method, I noticed it had the option of entering an ‘EID’ instead of going to the instructions, and after a bit of searching, I did indeed find an EID for the new phone in the tiniest print possible. Upon entering that, the phone number moved to the new phone fairly quickly, and all was well.
So, I’ve got the new phone basically back to the same level of setup as the old phone, and I’ll have to fiddle with it some more, see what’s new, what’s better, etc. And I have one other thing to set up, though I haven’t even opened it yet. Yes, I finally caved, and after decades of not wearing one at all and scoffing at the idea, I will soon be…an Apple Watch wearer.