Three weeks ago John Ternus replaced Tim Cook. Twelve days ago Apple unveiled the iPhone 18. And this week, as every September, millions of people open a box that costs more than a thousand euros and discover the truth: the most expensive product in their digital life does not know how to copy itself.
I have lived in the Apple ecosystem for years. I have several iPhones at home and at the company. I have performed this ritual more times than I care to remember. It gets worse every time. Not by magic: the volume of photos, WhatsApp, health data, watch, eSIM and Wallet grows, and the procedure is still the 2018 one — a wireless radio, no resume, no pause, and an Apple Watch that, if it gets upset, forces you to reset it.
This is not a tutorial. It is the question nobody in Cupertino seems to be paid to answer: how is it possible that a four-trillion-dollar company does not have a single person, full time, whose job is to make changing iPhone stop being an odyssey?
1. The day you change iPhone is not the day you buy it
Apple sells the hardware as if the product life cycle were the unboxing. New camera, faster chip, titanium, Ultra, Pro. The keynote lasts an hour. The transfer, if you draw the short straw, lasts a weekend. Sometimes two.
I know people who do not change models precisely because of this. The 14 is fine. The 15 is fine. A camera bump does not pay for three nights with two phones plugged in, a mute watch, an eSIM in limbo and credit cards missing from Wallet. That is not brand loyalty. It is fear of the rite of passage.
In any other industry this is called switching cost: the cost of changing. Serious software works to lower it. At Apple, the cost of going from iPhone to iPhone — same maker, same Apple Account, same silicon — has become a moat. A moat that does not keep you because the product is irreplaceable. It keeps you because you are afraid of losing two days of your life.
I run a company. If on a Monday morning I do not have a working phone — calls, client WhatsApp, authenticators, Wallet to pay a toll — that is not a «setup inconvenience». It is a hole in the operation. Apple designs as if the user had a free Saturday, an empty table and zero consequences.
2. Quick Start: the same radio as AirDrop, and zero resume
What Apple calls Quick Start
The name is a joke. Quick Start is the flow that appears when you put the new iPhone next to the old one: a swirl, a scan, Bluetooth to find each other, and from there a device-to-device transfer over peer-to-peer Wi‑Fi. It is the same family of radios as AirDrop. That is why people call it AirDrop. Because that is what it is, in another suit: two antennas, two batteries, a fragile link, and tens of gigabytes trying to cross a room.
Apple also documents a USB‑C cable transfer. CNET, in an 18 September 2026 guide for the iPhone 18 Pro, says the cable is its preferred method and that over the air «it could take over an hour». On Chinese forums this summer, for 100 GB they talk about 3–4 hours wireless versus 1–1.5 hours by cable. That is the clean case. The real case — 256 or 512 GB, photo library, app backups, a Watch half-paired — is another film.
The problem is not that the cable exists. The problem is that the interface does not push you to use it, does not let you plug it in mid-job to speed things up, and if the wireless link rots, there is no plan B. On Reddit, users who have just bought the phone admit that «it didn't even prompt me»: Quick Start starts over the radio and you sit there watching a bar.
What happens when it breaks
It breaks. It breaks if you lock the old phone. It breaks if an app asks for attention. It breaks if the home Wi‑Fi has neighbours. It breaks if iOS decides to update halfway. It breaks if the new phone was not on the same version as the old one. And when it breaks, the official doctrine — Apple Support, Ask Different, the 2026 guides in Japanese and English — is a single sentence:
Erase the new iPhone. Go back to the Hello screen. Start from scratch.
There is no resume. There is no checkpoint. There is no «continue from 73 %». An Ask Different thread on interrupted Quick Start has 96,000 views and the top answer is exactly that: you cannot resume. You have to erase. In 2019. In 2024. In 2026. The same ritual.
In engineering that is called a stateless transfer. In 2026, with half-terabyte disks and Wi‑Fi 7 radios, it is a product decision. Someone, at some point, chose not to spend the sprint on a resume. And eight years later it is still unfixed.
3. Eighteen hours. No pause. No cable. No mercy
I have seen progress bars that promise 40 minutes and turn into a night. I have seen estimates that go up while both phones sit there, motionless, plugged in, ten centimetres apart. Eighteen hours is not a Twitter exaggeration. It is what happens when the peer-to-peer link goes glacial — interference, thermal throttling, thousands of tiny files, a photo library that will not fit in a single stream — and the system offers you no lever at all.
You cannot pause. You cannot tell it «stop, I have to go out». You cannot tell it «restart the link but keep what was copied». You cannot tell it «I am plugging in a cable now so this stops being a joke». If you cancel, the new iPhone is left half-done: a zombie device that needs Erase All Content and Settings before you return to square one.
An authorised-store worker on Reddit, in February 2026, described the moment the old iPhone shows «prepare this iPhone for sale» — meaning it treats the transfer as closed — while the new one has received nothing. Another, in April, put 70 % of transfers in the problem bucket. The Mirror collected cases of people going «for days» without getting iCloud, Finder or Quick Start to work. That is not a clumsy user. It is a procedure that fails at the point of sale, with staff who do it thirty times a day.
Samsung, at the same counter, launches Smart Switch and lets you use the phone while it copies. If it fails, you retry. No factory reset. The clerks themselves say it: Android at this point is another civilisation.
4. Restore from iCloud: the three-day zombie phone
What iCloud does copy
Apple's plan B is iCloud. You restore a backup, the phone restarts, and in fifteen minutes «you can use it». That is the sentence in the guides. The small print is different: apps are downloaded again from the App Store. Each app's data arrives when iCloud feels like it. Photos, if your library lives in the cloud, show up as ghosts until they download. The phone is usable in the sense that there are icons. Not in the sense that your digital life is there.
I have come back from an iCloud restore with settings changed, notifications reshuffled, mail accounts half-built, the right wallpaper and the rest of the system as if someone had shaken a sack of preferences. It is not that iCloud always fails. It is that it fails politely: it hands you a device that looks like yours and behaves like a distant cousin for two or three days.
What iCloud leaves half-done
If the backup is large, the guides talk about hours. In extreme cases, more than twelve. If it gets stuck, Apple shows you the Stop Restoring iPhone button. Stopping does not give you a phone. It gives you a half-phone, again.
And there is a version trap that Apple documents in its own support (article 108811): if the backup needs a newer iOS, you update, erase, and start the assistant again. In iPhone 18 / iOS 27 season this is not a rarity. It is the September toll. A Reddit user summed it up: the new phone forces an update during the transfer, the transfer freezes, and the community fix is… set the phone up empty, update, erase, and only then copy. Three setups for one.
iCloud, on top of that, is a paid product. A local backup on a Mac fits on a disk you already own. A cloud backup, once you pass 5 GB, is a subscription. Every friction on the local path pushes toward that subscription. I say this without conspiracy theory: it is the incentive. I measure it every time Finder asks me for a confirmation on the iPhone screen to do what iTunes used to do on its own twenty years ago.
5. The Apple Watch: if the transfer fails, reset the watch too
If you have an Apple Watch, the iPhone ritual becomes a three-device ritual. Apple Support, updated 14 September 2026, says it with a calm that is frightening: if the new iPhone asks whether you want to use the watch, you continue. If it says Start Pairing, you first have to unpair the Watch.
Unpairing, in Apple's dictionary, is not disconnecting. It is a factory restore. It wipes the watch. It removes Activation Lock. It asks for the Apple Account password. On GPS + Cellular models, it asks whether you keep or drop the data plan. Before wiping, the iPhone tries to back up the Watch. If the iPhone is stuck in a failed Quick Start, that backup is a roulette wheel.
The practical result: a phone transfer that goes sideways leaves you with a watch you cannot «launch» on the new iPhone without going through the reset. Bracelets, rings, the sleep Watch, the training Watch. All off until the pairing god takes pity. There is no «this watch is already mine, just change phones». There is a «if the software fails to guess the context, format the wearable».
For anyone who uses the Watch as a real watch — health, sleep, payments, house key — that is not an extra. It is losing the object you wear twelve hours a day because the phone next to it did not finish a copy.
The cross-unlock toggles Quick Start turns off
Even if the Watch survives the ritual, the cross-unlock ecosystem does not travel. Quick Start leaves the three devices «paired» and, at the same time, mute with one another. Each switch has to be flipped back on by hand, on each device, as if the Apple Account did not know who you are:
- On the Mac: Unlock with Apple Watch.
- On the Watch: Unlock with iPhone.
- On the iPhone: Unlock with Apple Watch.
Three switches. The same Apple Account. The same iCloud. And the assistant that has just copied 200 GB is incapable of copying three booleans. It is the perfect summary of the problem: Apple knows how to clone your photo library and does not know how to clone a checkbox.
6. eSIM and cards: unreachable and unable to pay
The eSIM
At least a plastic SIM could be pulled with a paperclip. The eSIM lives in a profile. Apple offers eSIM Quick Transfer between iPhones. On paper it is beautiful. In practice, «eSIM transfer failed» is an industry: restart both, update iOS, same Wi‑Fi, call the carrier, ask for a new QR.
eSIM QR codes are usually single use. If the transfer breaks halfway, the profile can be left straddling the old phone and the new one: neither of them places a call, or both think they own the line. In the United States, the iPhone 18 Pro is already eSIM only. Europe is on the same road. Turning the phone line into software that cannot be resumed is a strange bet for a company that sells «it just works».
If you have two lines — personal and company, Spain and Italy — you duplicate the ritual. Each carrier has its religion. Some push the profile. Others send you to the app. Others leave you hanging on a Sunday.
The cards
Apple Pay does not travel. The guides say it without shame: cards have to be added again and the bank verifies again. Sometimes it works first time. Sometimes Wallet says Could Not Add Card, Invalid Card, or the infamous «for security reasons» block that demands a review from the device itself (Apple support 126755). Meanwhile you cannot pay for parking, you cannot pay for coffee, you cannot open the metro gate if your transit card also lived in Wallet.
House keys, car keys, hotel passes, boarding passes. Wallet has become a keyring. A keyring Apple does not copy. You rebuild it by hand, bank by bank, issuer by issuer, with Face ID, SMS and the bank app that that day wants nothing to do with new tokens.
It is the last kilometre of a transfer that already lasted eighteen hours: the phone «is ready», but you cannot call and you cannot pay. In any adult definition of «operational device», that is a zero.
7. The local Wi‑Fi backup that asks permission every time
For years, a Mac with Finder (formerly iTunes) was the decent path: encrypted local backup, with Health and Watch data, without paying for iCloud+, restorable by cable in half an hour. It is still, technically, the best path. Apple has been making it hostile.
Since iOS 16.1 / 15.7.1, every backup or sync demands the iPhone passcode. Not once per Mac. Every time. iMazing documented it. TidBITS explained it. The origin was a real vulnerability (Csaba Fitzl): an attacker with physical access could trigger a backup to an unprotected folder. Apple's patch was the crudest possible: a human tap on every connection, USB or Wi‑Fi.
The result, years later, is this: you want a local Wi‑Fi backup — the one that would save you from iCloud — and the iPhone has to be unlocked, looking at you, to confirm. There is no «this home Mac is trusted until I say otherwise» that survives a reboot with dignity. There is a liturgy. If you are not standing there, there is no backup. If there is no local backup, the only automatic copy is iCloud. And iCloud, past 5 GB, is paid.
Calling that «security» is generous. It is security that coincides, millimetre by millimetre, with the interest of selling storage. A Mac on your network, with FileVault, with your account, is not an attacker in a café. Treating it as if it were, every night, is a product decision. And it is a decision that pushes people toward the paid cloud.
8. What the stores say, not just me
When a procedure fails at home, Apple can say the customer's Wi‑Fi is bad. When it fails in the Apple Store, at the carrier and at the authorised reseller, the diagnosis changes.
- A retail employee on r/iphone (April 2026): 70 % of transfers have problems. Quick Start cycles that return to «enjoy your phone» without having copied anything. A two-hour temporary iCloud backup. Another hour of software update. Restore. Three acts for one scene.
- An AT&T reseller (February 2026): dread every time a customer asks for an upgrade. After iOS 26.2, «Transfer from another iPhone» breaks and the old phone marks the job as done. Internal advice: flee to iCloud because «it is the only thing that more or less works».
- The Mirror (April 2026): iPhone 16 and 17 users going for days with neither backup nor Quick Start. The community fix is the usual dance: set up empty, update, erase, start.
- Ask Different: 96,000 people looking for how to resume a Quick Start. The answer is that you cannot.
That is not a thread of three unlucky souls. It is a pattern. And it is a pattern Apple does not put in the keynote. The keynote shows the titanium. The counter shows the erase.
9. Samsung already solved it. Apple bills $100 billion in services
Smart Switch is not perfect. It is, simply, software that assumes copying a phone is a job that can fail, and therefore has retry, cable, Wi‑Fi, and lets you use the destination while it finishes. Apple assumes copying a phone is a sacrament: either it completes in silence, or you wipe the altar and consecrate it again.
Meanwhile Apple says services are a business of more than $100 billion. iCloud+ is part of that business. Apple Care is part of that business. Wallet is part of that business. Each of those products benefits from a painful transfer: more people pay for storage, more people go to the Genius Bar, more people stay in the garden because leaving costs a weekend.
There is no need to attribute malice. Looking at the incentives is enough. The hardware team wins if you buy the iPhone 18. The services team wins if iCloud+ stays. The Quick Start team does not appear in the leadership photos. Nobody gets a bonus because median time to a truly usable iPhone drops from three days to twenty minutes.
That is why the title question is not rhetorical. A company of this size has departments for the hinge shine, for the Taptic Engine sound, for the titanium colour. Where is the department whose only metric is: the customer changed iPhone on Saturday and on Monday they were working?
10. Ternus, the modem, and the question of a single person
John Ternus has been CEO since 1 September 2026. He comes from Hardware Engineering. He has been at Apple for 25 years. The handover announced in April was sold as «perfectly smooth». Cook stays as executive chairman, with Washington and Beijing. Ternus inherits the product.
A month ago I documented another inheritance of the Cook era: two iPhone 17 Pro / Pro Max units that do not recover the network after a tunnel or a basement. A phone that does not receive calls. A transfer that cannot be resumed. A watch that gets formatted if the assistant gets lost. A Wallet that forgets your cards. These are not isolated bugs. It is a culture that celebrates the announcement and abandons Tuesday.
Ternus is an engineer. Engineers understand checkpoints, resumes, cables, states. If anyone can look at Quick Start and say «this is unacceptable», it is a CEO who has spent his life inside the hardware. The question is whether he will treat the experience of changing iPhone as a product problem — or as September noise to be ignored until the iPhone 19.
What I would ask of a single person
I am not asking for a committee. I am asking for one person, full time, with authority to break silos, and this list:
- Resume. Checkpoints. If the link drops at 73 %, the 73 % is on disk and it continues. Erasing the new phone stops being plan A.
- Hot-plug cable. If the radio is slow, you plug in USB‑C and the flow changes transport without restarting the mass.
- Pause. A «continue tomorrow» button. The old phone is not held hostage for eighteen hours.
- Watch without a format. Migrate the watch to a new iPhone on the same Apple Account without a factory Restore, unless the user asks for it. And the cross-unlock toggles — Mac, Watch, iPhone — should arrive on, not off.
- Atomic eSIM and Wallet. The line and the cards travel with the phone or the transfer is not marked closed. No «you're done» without being able to call or pay.
- Home local backup. A trusted Mac, on your network, makes Wi‑Fi copies without you unlocking the iPhone every night. The 2022 patch can be done properly: authenticate the computer, not a daily liturgy.
- A public metric. Median time to a truly usable iPhone (calls, WhatsApp, Wallet, Watch). If it is not measured, it does not exist.
Seven points. It is not a moonshot. It is what any storage and migration team would have demanded in 2014. Apple has the silicon, the radios, the stores and the Apple Account. It lacks the humility to treat the transfer as a product, not a ceremony.
If you have lived this odyssey — eighteen hours, a formatted Watch, an eSIM stranded, an empty Wallet — write to me. It is not an isolated case. It is the September rite. And it is Ternus's first exam that does not fit in a keynote.