Connect your device to your Mac or Windows machine

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Connect your device to your Mac or Windows machine

When it comes to syncing the data between your iOS device and your computer, you have the choice of doing so by connecting your device to your Mac or PC with the included lightning USB cable, or you can do so wirelessly as long as your device and computer are on the same wireless network. But in order to sync wirelessly, you do need to set up your device first by connecting one end of the included USB cable into the device, and the other end into your computer. If iTunes isn't currently open, it may open once your device is detected, but that depends on a setting we'll look at shortly. If iTunes doesn't open, go ahead and open it manually yourself.

Here we are looking at the main iTunes window. You can see my devices listed here under Devices, and to manage it, I click the Devices button up here. And here I can see my device's details. So when your device is selected, you'll see it appear at the top of this left column, and below that is a series of categories with the Summary category selected. Under Summary, you can find your device's vitals like its name, capacity, software versions, serial number and so on. Incidentally if you want to change the name of your device, click its current name, and type in a new one.

I'm just going to leave mine as is though. Here on the upper right-hand side, you'll either see a message telling you that your iPhone, iPad or iPod software is up to date, or you'll see a message that a newer version of the software is available. Apple frequently releases updates to iOS, sometimes fixing bugs, other times adding major new features. Many people like to update to the latest version of the software when it becomes available, although many other people prefer to wait a few days to see if the new software introduces any issues for any of the iOS devices. But when an update is available you can click the Update button that will appear here to download and install the software.

Or, in this case, I can click Check For Update. And you can see iTunes is telling me the version of the iPhone software I have right now is the current version. This is also where you find the button to restore your device. There may come a time when your device is just acting strangely, maybe it's not booting up right, or it's locked up. Now there are various fixes and solutions you can find on Apple's website, and we'll talk more about this in the chapter on troubleshooting, but as a last resort, you can click the Restore button to return the device to its factory new condition. I say it's a last resort because restoring completely erases the device, and installs a fresh copy of the operating system, so you'll lose all the items stored on it.

If you back up your device regularly, which again, we'll talk about in the troubleshooting chapter, you should have copies of everything in iTunes anyway. But it takes time to re-copy everything back to your device so use the Restore button as a last measure. Next we have the Backup section where you can choose to backup your device either to iCloud or to your computer, but I'll talk about this in its own movie later. And under the Options section we have several options or checkboxes. At the top here we have automatically sync when this iPhone is connected. When checked your iPhone will automatically transfer and receive new music, calendars, contacts and so on that you've added to your computer or phone.

In some cases, this might just say automatically open iTunes when this iPhone is connected, but whatever the option is, if you check it, iTunes will automatically open when you connect your iPhone. Next we have sync with this iPhone over WiFi. This is the checkbox you want to check if you want the ability to sync your device with iTunes without connecting it with a lightning cable. I'll cove this option in its own movie later. Next we have sync only checked songs and videos. With this option selected, iTunes won't include any unchecked files when it copies files to your device, and that's referring to the checkboxes the appear next to your files in your library.

So if I go back and look at my music, you can see checkboxes next to all of the songs here. If I were to uncheck any of these, none of those would be copied over to my iPhone. The next two options are designed to save space on your device. Prefer standard definition videos, when checked, will copy standard definition movies to your device instead of the hi-def of HD version if you happen to have both versions of a movie stored in iTunes. Similarly, if the music you have in your iTunes library is encoded in a high bit rate, meaning you have very high quality audio files, you can check this option to have iTunes automatically convert songs to a slightly lower bit rate, and that'll reduce their file size so you don't take up as much space on your device.

I'll leave both of those options unchecked for now. You might find these two options useful if you have a smaller capacity device. And the next option here is manually manage music and videos. This option lets you manually drag songs and videos to your device instead of letting iTunes move files for you automatically. We'll talk more about this when we look at syncing coming up. But the question that often comes up here is which option is better, manually updating or automatic syncing? And it really depends on whether you prefer the control of manually managing the content on your device, or if you prefer to set up some rules and playlists to determine what gets copied to your device.

And again we'll look at the syncing options shortly. But for now those are some of the items and options you'll find under the Summary category when you connect your iOS device to your computer. Next we'll look at some of these other categories over here and see how to manage the contents of your device.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ios-10-iphone-and-ipad-essential-training/connect-your-device-to-your-mac-or-windows-machine