Hands-On Tech 204 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
00:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Coming up on Hands-On Tech. Let's take a look at troubleshooting connecting one's iPhone to their Windows PC. Stay tuned. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech. This is the show where I, micah Sargent, take your tech questions and do my best to answer them. We have a great question this week where we are kind of bridging the gap and crossing the streams, which you're supposed to never do, but we're doing it. Jerry has written in.
00:35
Jerry writes iTunes has stopped showing my phone when I connect my iPhone 16 Pro Max on my XPS that's a Dell XPS. I have tried restarting the laptop and phone, as well as uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes both formats the Microsoft version and Apple's latest version and nothing seems to work for me. So there are a few things to understand when it to using your iPhone and controlling your iPhone on the Windows machine. Firstly, apple has been trying to slowly phase out iTunes as the means of controlling and making adjustments to your iPhone on Windows. In Windows 10 and later, you can access all of this stuff using the dedicated apps. So there's an Apple Music app that you can get, the Apple Music app for Windows. There's the Apple TV app for Windows, which, of course, gives you access to your kind of iTunes movie, tv show content, and then the one that I imagine, jerry, you're trying to use or that you would want to use, which is the Apple Devices app for Windows. That is the app that lets you update, backup, restore and manage your iPhone or your iPad and manually sync content from your PC manage your iPhone or your iPad and manually sync content from your PC.
02:09
So, before we even talk about iTunes, I want to suggest that you have these apps instead of using or trying to use iTunes. Here's the rub If you download, this is according to Apple. If you download even one of these apps, download, this is according to Apple. If you download even one of these apps the Apple Music app for Windows, the Apple TV app for Windows, the Apple Devices app for Windows and you still have iTunes for Windows on your Windows machine and you try to use it, it will not work. It won't do the things that you expect it to do, because the app will detect that you have one of the three apps and will want to push you to those apps instead. So, basically, apple is doing everything that it. You can continue to use iTunes for Windows. That's the only time that you would want to. I highly recommend using them, because Apple is not going to continue to support and continue to update that original iTunes app. So I know that you know it's convenient to stick with what you know and what's there, but you are putting yourself into a position where, in the future, that app isn't going to work at all, and so you really do want to move on to these three, if you're able to.
03:48
If you're not able to, jerry, though, there are a few things that we can try to try to fix what's going on here. So for one, in order for Windows to be able to access and control an iPhone, the device, the Windows machine, needs to have the Apple Mobile Device Service tool on Windows, and you need to, if you're having trouble with it, restart AMDS, as it's called, again, apple Mobile Device Service. So what you can do is you need to close iTunes and disconnect the iPhone that's connected. Go to Run, which you probably know, windows Key plus R, and then you type servicesmsc and click OK, which opens the services console. Click OK, which opens the Services Console, and then you find and click on Apple Mobile Device Service. Click Properties, and then, where the Startup Type option appears, you set it to Automatic, and then you click stop so that it stops the service, and then you click start so that it starts the service. You click OK, you restart your computer, you open iTunes and you connect the device. That can sometimes fix the issue, but sometimes that doesn't fix the issue, and so another thing that you can do is you can update or reinstall the Apple Mobile Device USB driver. So this is something else that is needed in order to access and control an iPhone, and this is a tool that is part of kind of your USB drivers.
05:37
You go into Device Manager in Windows. You find portable devices or universal serial bus controllers, wherever it happens to be. Find your iPhone and then look for Apple Mobile Device USB driver. You want to uninstall that, restart your machine, plug in your iPhone, and what that does is it forces a reinstall and a fresh install of that driver. It forces a reinstall and a fresh install of that driver. So what we've done so far again is we have restarted the Apple Mobile Device Service tool and then we have uninstalled and forced a reinstall of the Apple Mobile Device USB driver.
06:18
If, at that point, you're still having trouble getting it to show up, then the last thing I recommend is that you reset your trust settings on your iPhone and listen up to those of you who have an iPhone, even if you don't have a Windows machine. If you are trying to connect and you're having issues with the connection because for some reason the device isn't, the trust settings aren't working sometimes that can become corrupted you can reset this. And just so you know, I'm talking about how, when you plug in an iPhone to a device for the first time, you will occasionally, depending on the device, see a thing pop up that says trust this computer question mark and then you can choose trust or don't trust, and usually you only need to do that once per kind of install of the operating system. And so you plug in your iPad, you plug in your iPhone and it asks do you trust this device? You say yes and then you move along. Sometimes you have to type in a code, whatever. Then it goes away.
07:30
But if you're having issues where the device doesn't seem to be connecting properly, it could be that that trust is having some trust issues. So this is again one of those things where you learn a new thing, and I was excited to learn this because I wouldn't guess that this was the place that you go. But to reset your trust settings, you go to settings general, you go to transfer or reset and in this case it's an iPhone, or if it's an iPad, then it will say transfer or reset iPad and then you tap on reset and up pops a list of options Reset all settings, reset network settings, delete all eSIMs, reset keyboard dictionary, reset handwriting style, reset home screen layout, reset location and privacy. You need to tap reset location and privacy, believe it or not. That is where Apple gives you control over those trust settings for each computer to which you've connected your iPhone or your iPad, whatever device it is. When you reset that, then plugging it back in will ask you once again if you want to trust this machine.
08:45
So it could just be that your iPhone and your Windows machine are having trust issues. It could be that your machine is new enough that you have at some point downloaded the Apple Music app for Windows, the Apple TV app for Windows or the Apple devices app for Windows, and iTunes has detected that and is therefore saying no, no, no, you need to move on to the new thing. Or it could be that one of the kind of drivers or services that are required to get the iPhone working is not working as it should, and those could be responsible. If it's none of those, jerry, then I think that you might want to check that your cord, your cable, is okay, that you don't have a problem with the USB-C cable that is running to the machine. You said you have a 16, so the 16 Pro. So I know you've got USB-C. Try a different cable at that point and see if that fixes it. So lots of different troubleshooting options there and surely, surely, one of them will work. So, jerry, let us know how things go with those different settings and, of course, we'll have links to the different pages that I've talked about in the show notes for you so that you can solve that problem. And hopefully this is one of those times where your question is going to be helpful to lots of people who have this issue of connecting their iPhone to their Windows machine.
10:26
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11:12
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