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iPhone update failed: in recovery mode, Mac spins on "loading ..."

I tried to update my iOS using my Mac and sometime during the night it failed with an "unknown error." It is now in recovery mode ... showing a screen asking for a lightning cable to be inserted. Well, it is, and my Mac sees that an iPhone is attached. But the Mac is spinning on "Software: Loading ..." and it does not appear to be doing anything else. There is no progress-bar. There is no "restore" option or anything else displayed on the Mac screen for this phone.

Does this mean, well, that my Mac is loading software onto the iPhone? Or is it somehow stuck?

Of course the iPhone was first backed-up to the Mac before I started any of this. But the support screens tell me that my Mac should be saying, e.g.: "There is a problem with this iPhone." It isn't doing any of that. So it appears to me to be "stuck" in some way.

iPhone 11, iOS 15

Posted on Feb 16, 2022 4:02 AM

Top-ranking reply

Twelve Shades Publications Author

Level 1

42 points

Posted on Feb 16, 2022 6:52 AM

Update: The incident was resolved and appears to have been incorrect Mac behavior. (See my later post on this discussion forum.)

The behavior of my Macintosh (Monterey current-version) was fundamentally incorrect, as you can plainly see from the description above. Apple Support suggested that I restart the Mac, and when I did so, mirable dictu!, everything suddenly started working as expected and I was able to update the phone. (I do not know if this strange Mac behavior was the actual reason why the iPhone update had previously failed. The Mac did complete the backup normally before it failed to install the update.)

Since I was on the phone with Apple Support at the time, I escalated the incident so that a RADAR ticket would be created to document the unexplained Mac behavior that I had been seeing, and this has now been done. I have also posted an entry to this discussion forum to fully document the problem in case anyone else should encounter it.

Before the restart, the Mac cycled between "Loading" and "Software: Loading" but the iPhone never started loading anything. Then, after the restart, everything just started working as it was supposed to. The software environment on the iPhone was not affected.

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iPhone update failed: in recovery mode, Mac spins on "loading ..."

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