This will be easy, I said.
I've done this before, and I can just knock this out in an hour, I said.
18 hours later, including 12 without a working phone... and three days later, my phone is upgraded... but is STILL not back to normal!
So I'm part of the Apple iPhone Upgrade gimmick, which means I can get a new phone every time Apple rolls one out. You may or may not know that the latest and greatest iPhone 13 came out last week, and of course, like clockwork, mine was on order and showed up on Friday. Friday night, I began the three-or-so hour transfer of memory from one device to the new device... and went to sleep.
I woke up, the upgrade was complete - or so I thought. Without checking the new phone's status, I grabbed my old phone and clicked the button to wipe the phone's memory so I could send it back to Apple... and get my trade in value applied to my account.
That's when things went terribly wrong.
I went back to the new iPhone... and nothing worked. I forgot a password to an account, and, since I had wiped the old phone, I couldn't do some two-step verification thing, which left the new phone just sitting there, almost bricked, unable to make calls, connect to wifi, to the phone network, nothing.
So I did a factory reset on the phone, thinking I could just restore my memory from a 'cloud' back up.
Wrong.
The phone does it's factory reset... and then, came back to life, ready to be updated from the cloud... but there was just one problem. I could connect to wifi now, but I couldn't connect to a mobile network.
When I wiped the phone, I wiped out the electrionic sim card - that card which goes into the side of the phone. Yah, well, my new phone was preprogrammed for my personal account before I reset it. Not anymore.
So... I had to find the little key, pop the sim out of the old phone, put the old sim back into the new phone and then boom. Heartbeat.
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE...
The factory reset wiped out ALL PASSWORDS, all of my APPLE PAY SETTINGS, my VIRTUAL WALLET... all of it. Three days later, I'm still trying to get all of this sorted out... and I'm not there yet. I can't even check my checking account because, well, I'm LOCKED OUT of that account because of too many failed password attempts!
UGH.
Next time, I'm going to Apple Store like I used to do anyway... to pick up the phone and to let the GENIUSES handle it...
... because although I'm a fan, I'm clearly NOT an Apple iPhone Activation GENIUS.
Thank you.