So your iPhone 6 battery periodically goes from 60% charge to 10% with no warning (queue the low power mode warning). You plug it in and it leaps to 50%. It happens often enough that you decide to get it checked out since you only have a month left on your AppleCare warranty.  With Apple’s excellent diagnostic tools, the almost two-year old battery checks out fine, but when they dig into the detailed graphs they see the sudden, unexplainable drops and agree to replace the phone under warranty. Of course a full backup was done that morning to iTunes, an encrypted one to include as much information as possible to save time. But you forget how much goes into reconfiguring an iPhone. Let me remind you (or just log it in case I forget for the next time):

  • Restore from encrypted backup and don’t forget that password!
  • Setup ApplePay again, each credit card (verify)
  • Setup BlueTooth devices (reminded once you get in the car & nothing plays)
  • Download Audible books again
  • Setup your fingerprint authentication
  • Download your Vanity Fair & New Yorker magazines you hadn’t read yet
  • Setup Find My Friends to this device
  • Reauthorize iMessage
  • If you sync Google calendars via MS Exchange plug-in, you’ll have to go in with their sync tool and reselect those calendars for the replacement phone before they’ll show up again.
  • Reset Apple Watch & reconfigure
  • Re-pair your Apple Watch to your replacement iPhone
  • Setup Apple Pay on Apple Watch (verify again)
My iPhone performs so many functions (see previous posts) that it always amazes me that Apple is able to get you in and out the door so quickly with a working replacement.
(I realize many of these reconfigurations are security related and appreciate the extra layer of protection.)