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vengapat9

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 16, 2020
87
204
Brooklyn, NY
Hi! As many of you probably are, I’m exciting my iPhone 12 pro next Friday. I normally just restore from back up / iCloud but this year I’m thinking about setting the phone up as new. Especially since I’m downgrading from the pro max to the regular pro and my current phone is just cluttered with endless apps that I don’t really use.

How will you be approaching your iPhone set up this year?
 
I can guarantee that if you set up your new iPhone as new and not from a backup — you'll never do it again.

It's brutal tedious. Takes days
Hmm you’re right, I have so many apps with logins all over the place. Maybe I’ll take the next week to delete a bunch of apps I don’t use.
 
Usually I restore from backup but might take this weekend to set up from new. I have a few weird bugs like Siri not setting reminders properly and Mail consistently showing notifications when there is nothing unread. Haven’t done a clean install since 2012ish with my iPhone 5.

Does Apple Watch Activity data/achievements sync via iCloud now? That would be the only thing that stopped me - it used to only retain those if restored from a backup but seem to remember reading that that data is now stored in the cloud.
 
I can guarantee that if you set up your new iPhone as new and not from a backup — you'll never do it again.

It's brutal tedious. Takes days
Days? It takes me about 3hrs or so, to get everything like I want. Unless someone has a very, very slow connection, it shouldn’t take days. It shouldn’t even take a full day.
 
Plan to restore from backup on both the new phones. Then will reset and set up my 7+ as a new phone for the preteen.

I’ve done a lot of housecleaning and dropping apps into the App Library if they aren’t used often. I like a clean look on my phone.
 
I’m gonna do the side by side transfer. Having said that though, I’m not sure if all the Apple Watch data gets transferred in that method.
 
Normally I restore from back up but after doing that for years I’ll be setting up as new. It’s time to clear out a ton of apps I don’t use. Plus I want to set up my home screen with widgets better and would rather start fresh.
 
Direct transfer. I have done this many times and never had an issue. I do make a habit of clearing out apps I don't use.
 
I do the direct transfer as well unless after the transfer is complete I see a large amount of “Other” in storage. Then I will restore as new.
 
I always transfer from iCloud. I’m considering going as new and redownloading apps just to clear our stuff I don’t use. But may be a hassle to setup a ton of stuff again. Should just take some time and delete stuff.
 
I’ll set up as new. It gives me a chance to revisit which apps I need installed, and which settings should be changed from the defaults. Most of my data is in iCloud, so my photos and music will be synced right away.

It also feels more like a “new phone” experience to not have everything set up identically to my old phone.
 
What will be the new phone os? 14.0.0 or 14.0.1. If it is former, not sure I could even restore my backup of 14.0.1 to lower os.
 
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