It’s upgrade week for IOS. I finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade IOS 9 to IOS 10 on my iPhone 6S. Usually I wait until about the second minor update has come out and we’re now at 10.0.2 as of late last week, so Sunday night was the night.

Even though the initial problems with over-the-air upgrades was solved, I’m still sticking with using iTunes on my desktop Mac Mini to do the upgrade. I grabbed my charging cable, plugged the phone into the computer, started up iTunes because it’s configured not to start automatically, and first went to do a back up.

Backup and Download

Starting at about 22:35, I did an encrypted backup which said it was taking about 10 minutes but that last 10 seconds seemed to take an additional five minutes or so. The encrypted back up will grab the key chains and such.

From there I clicked the button to proceed with the 10.0.2 install and it began the download to my computer. This was the most uncomfortable part because there’s no progress bar or anything to really indicate it’s working. I was monitoring the network traffic with Activity Monitor and could see the actual packet rates as it downloaded, but I would have preferred to have more feedback.

The downloading seemed to finally finish at about 23:40. I just happened to look up and notice the message in iTunes that said it was downloading had changed to click Upgrade to begin the upgrade.

Install

The upgrade was much quicker and the progress bars appeared on the phone as usual. After only about 14 minutes at 23:54 the phone went dark for quite a few seconds. Again I wondered if all was well but the white reboot screen with the black apple finally appeared. There was another progress bar and then I was logging in with my pass code on the phone at 23:56.

iTunes then popped up a box saying there was an upgrade from the carrier so I clicked that button and it quickly and silently installed with no indication that anything happened from the phone itself.

By about midnight I was done. I fooled around with the phone for another 15 minutes or so, moved the newly appeared Home app into a folder, and it was done.

Post Install

I just looked at things briefly. The lock screen, swipe-up screen and the notifications screen are all different. The new buttons in Messages were there but it was too late to try any of that. Also the wake-up, unlock process is different. So far it’s a little confusing in the sense that I’m not sure what’s different. You push the home button to unlock the screen which is what I thought I used to do.

If there’s anything else interesting enough to follow up on I’ll report back later.

References

From iMore iOS 10 review: Cleaner, cleverer, and more convenient
From Song-a-Day Jonathon Mann Video