iOS 6 was first announced a couple months back at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, otherwise known as WWDC ’12, and with the iPhone 5 showcased last week in a well documented Yerba Buena-based affair, Apple also revealed the latest iteration of its famous mobile ecosystem would be landing on 19th. True to its word, the company has made the final version of iOS 6 available to download for the masses today.
You might be eager to dive in and get to grips with the exciting new features like Maps, Passbook, and the Facebook integration, among many other changes, but it’s important to ensure you carry out the upgrade correctly to avoid any data loss and such.
Sure, the steps are simple enough but if, for example, you’re jailbroken, you’ll especially need to heed the following pointers to ensure you can revert to your jailbroken iOS iteration in future. There’s nothing worse than being stuck, unable to downgrade or jailbreak, and waiting for weeks or even months for a jailbreak to appear. It takes the developers quite a while to discover vulnerabilities in Apple’s firmware, and with every new major release, that task becomes a little more difficult.
With the above in mind, we’ve compiled a peace-of-mind tutorial to ensure your upgrade to iOS 6 is as smooth as it should be.
Note:
- If you rely on unlock, do not update to iOS 6 yet.
- There is no untethered jailbreak available for iOS 6. The only jailbreak iOS 6 available is of tethered variety, and that too is only limited to iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPod touch.
Step 1: First and foremost, backup your device. You can do so via iTunes, or by using iCloud. It matters little which one you pick, so long as your data and settings are securely backed-up.
Step 3: Download and install iTunes 10.7 from here. This is required by the final version of iOS 6.
Step 4: If you’re not jailbroken, then installing via OTA (over-the-air) is most certainly your best bet, and you can achieve this by heading to Settings > General > Software Update. If you are jailbroken, then installing via iTunes is your best bet.
Step 5: To perform a fresh install if you’re not jailbroken, download iOS 6, and in iTunes, ensure you hold down the left SHIFT key on your PC or OPTION key on Mac, which will enable you to browse to the firmware file.
And that’s it! Once you’ve installed, you’ll be ready to enjoy all the goodies offered by the new iOS 6!
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