How to get itunes on my home mac to recognize the iphone that was activated my work pc?

July 11, 2007 7:27 AM

How to get itunes on my home mac to recognize the iphone that was activated my work pc?I've scraped around for two days looking for an answer to why my itunes wont recognize my iphone.

Plugged it in at home (10.3.9), itunes opened and asked to be upgraded to latest version. Check. Second time, plug in, and I need to upgrade to tiger. OK. Order from apple (disks in the mail, can't get this via download) so I activated the phone at work with my itunes on my pc and chose to sync later. (because all my info is on my home mac - ical contacts and schedules, etc). Phone works great, cool features, very happy. Received the 10.4.x upgrade in the mail, installed, yadda yadda and now MY MAC AND ITUNES DO NOT RECOGNIZE THE PHONE.

Ridiculous and dissapointing that there is not an easy remedy. I have to go back to the office and fiddle with it there, when all I want is to sync the info in front of me right now.

posted by jchinique to computers & internet (5 comments total)

The fact your iPhone was activated on your work PC is not really relavant. Go to Apple's support site and search for your Mac not recognizing the iPhone. On the Mac geek sites, the most common remedy to getting a Mac to see the phone is to shut the phone off [not sleep, but off by holding down the sleep button until you are prompted to turn it off]. Connect it to the doc. And then turn the phone on.
posted by birdherder at 7:49 AM on July 11, 2007

i dont know if the disc version of 10.4 is at version 10.4.10. you need 10.4.10 + itunes 7.3 to sync an iphone. so run software update if you havent yet done so.

also if you are synced with another PC/mac, you wont be able to sync with your home mac. the good news is that each individual syncable "thing" can be synced with a different machine. say for instance you have synced your music with your work mac - if you want to sync music with your home mac, iTunes will want to delete all your music from the iPhone and repopulate from your home mac. however, you can still sync your address book contacts from a different mac, even if the music is synced to the home mac.
posted by joeblough at 7:52 AM on July 11, 2007

I went through all of the apple support steps to no avail.
The discs were an earlier version of 10.4 and i used software update to get 10.4.10. Itunes is 7.3

Can I un-sync from the pc, I wonder?
posted by jchinique at 8:07 AM on July 11, 2007

Woo Hoo, I am insanely happy! (bi-polar lot we mac junkies are, ni?) I erased all data from my iphone, and reinstalled the new itunes over the 10.4.10 upgrade. Sync'd great, thanks!
posted by jchinique at 8:53 AM on July 11, 2007

When you plug in the iphone to your mac, Run System Profiler.

This will permit you to see if your mac "Sees" your iphone.
posted by filmgeek at 9:07 AM on July 11, 2007