Fastest way to upgrade several iPhones' iOS?

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Fastest way to upgrade several iPhones' iOS?

I've got a lot of iPhone 6's supplied with iOS 8.2. Lots of our users have iOS 8.3 on their old phones, so they can't restore their iCloud backups to their new phones. What's the fastest way of upgrading them?

I've tried doing it wirelessly on the phones before I hand them out, but it means I've got to manually connect them to our WiFi and answer a lot of questions, and wait about 10 times longer than the time estimate it reports. Takes about 30 minutes.

I'm now trying it via iTunes, but it claims it will take 3 hours. Hopefully it will take less for the second one, but past experience suggests it won't. It also assumes it's going to be my phone, so it gives it my phone's name. I assume that'll get overwritten when they restore, but I don't like it. Some of the users won't do a restore, so could leave it like that.

iOS 8.1

Posted on Apr 20, 2015 8:55 PM

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Answer 1

pshute Author

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Apr 20, 2015 8:58 PM in response to pshute

iTunes says it needs to download 1.83GB. I assume the wireless upgrade only downloaded a fraction of that. Why the difference?

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Answer 2

pshute Author

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Apr 21, 2015 2:33 PM in response to pshute

Next morning. It's finished the download and I've upgraded the first phone. The second phone didn't require the download, but still has to go through the "Extracting software" phase before it can start upgrading. Slow, but probably faster that wireless upgrading, and will download less data in total if I do more than about 10 phones.

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Answer 3

pshute Author

Level 1

62 points

Apr 21, 2015 2:59 PM in response to pshute

It now appears that I can't upgrade phones that haven't been "set up". that's a pity, I was hoping I could skip that part. I'm also having to put in a SIM to activate them, despite it being happy with a blank SIM.

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