What You Should Know About Setting Up Your iPhone X

Now that I’ve taken delivery of an iPhone X and I’ve spent a few hours getting it to work, there are some lessons that I’ll pass along to other new owners to save you some frustration.

But first you need to do a few things to get ready to use your shiny new smartphone.First, make sure you have some means, besides the iPhone X, to connect to the internet, because you’ll probably spend some time searching Google to learn how to do various things.

Apple doesn’t tell you everything you need in those handy tips that show up when you get started.

iPhone X setup

You’ll also need plenty of time, because Apple did a few things that will make your life more difficult if you’re upgrading from a previous iPhone. You might also want to settle in with some crackers, your favorite cheese and a good Bordeaux because those will help you with your patience.

But first, prepare yourself for a little surprise. When you take your new iPhone X out of the box, you’ll see that it looks just like an iPhone 7 or 8. Until you notice the lack of the home button it’s hard to see too many differences. The fact that it’s essentially all screen without borders doesn’t become visible until you turn it on. That’s when the frustration starts.

If you performed an encrypted backup to your computer before you started your move to the new iPhone, you will probably notice that iTunes won’t let you proceed until you update iOS to 11.1 on your old phone.

You can do that by syncing with iTunes, or you can do an over-the-air update like most of us. Once you’ve updated iOS, you can back up your iPhone with an encrypted backup, which will preserve all of your passwords and other sensitive information.

Note that downloading a backup from iCloud won’t preserve that data, so you’ll need to be prepared for entering passwords and similar information all over again.

But once you’ve done that, it’s time for the next level of frustration in setting up your new iPhone, which appears after you’ve done the initial setup. This occurs when you try to restore your data from your backup. That’s when you find out that you can’t. Your restore from iTunes won’t happen because the versions of iOS don’t match.

You’ll also find out that you have no way from the restore screen to upgrade iOS. What you have to do is move back a few screens, then tell the setup routine that you’re starting up a new iPhone. That means that you’ll have to answer the same questions about your Apple ID, your passcode and so forth all over again. Then you’ll need to upgrade iOS.

Originally published on eWeek

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