What happened to the icons that use to show up to update my iphone?

I ended up going to the Apple store in San Diego for help. The service tech could not help me, said he was not good at operating windows 8 platform. He sent me to the Microsoft office located nearby. They stated that this was an Apple issue and I was told that someone at Apple should have been able to help me? Microsoft removed all old itunes and tried down loading new software, this did not work as we kept getting an error message. They refreshed my system and did a successfully down load. It now works but I am now in the process of reinstalling everything. Microsoft was outstanding, not so for Apple.