My dad’s phone was an iPhone 11 that he’s had for several years now, and one day, with no warning, it stopped charging.

My stop-gap solution was to hand him my wireless charger, which worked for a bit technically, but wasn’t suited for his work flow.

That’s okay; it was nearly Father’s Day so my sister and I got the iPhone SE for him.

After a week or so of waiting (which was about 6 days longer than I had anticipated; something to unpack here about my apparent high standards for delivery timelines), it arrived.

The ordeal

I thought it would be simple with the data transfer — he doesn’t have too many apps or personal data on his phone, and I only needed to preserve the connection to his work VPN, and chat history on the handful of chat apps he has that aren’t cloud-based.

(Yeah, looking at you, Whatsapp.)

I thought it would be simple and that it would only take a few minutes, because that’s how Apple has conditioned us to behave, right?

Instead, after pairing the phone and hitting ‘next’ on the steps, it got stuck on the iOS download and update screen.

I thought: this must be a mistake, so I restarted the process, did the pairing again, clicked ‘next’ again.

Sigh.

A cursory search found this issue starting back from at least 2020; at one point it told me it would take 5 days for it to finish downloading and transferring.

The solution

  1. Set up the phone as if it’s a new phone, and do not choose to import your settings and data from your old phone — no worries, you can do the transfer after these steps
  2. With the brand new phone, navigate to Settings > General > Software Update
  3. Wait a reasonable 15 – 20 minutes for the iOS update to be downloaded and updated
  4. Then, reset this phone to its factory settings, by going to Settings > General, and scrolling all the way down to Transfer or Reset iPhone
  5. Ignore the confusing taxonomy and select the ‘Erase All Content and Settings’ option
  6. Voilà. Now you can go through the phone data transfer and not run into the 5-day-wait problem