How to Switch Your Apple Watch to a New iPhone

This is easy to screw up. If you want to switch your Apple Watch to a new iPhone, you have to do it in this order:

  1. Unpair your watch from your old iPhone. This creates a fresh backup of your watch on your iPhone.

  2. Back up your old iPhone, either to iCloud or to iTunes. If you use iTunes, be sure to encrypt it, otherwise your Health, Activity, and passwords won’t get backed up.

  3. Restore your new iPhone from the old iPhone’s backup.

  4. Pair your watch with your new iPhone and restore your watch from the backup.

We got a few new iPhones here at the Gruber household today and I botched this, by forgetting step 1. Had to do it all over again with two phones and watches. It wasn’t fresh in my memory because last week when I was setting up my review unit iPhones, I also had a review unit watch, so it was natural to unpair my old watch before starting.

★ Friday, 16 September 2016