iPhone: The Missing Manual, 13th Edition

Chapter 15. Syncing with Computers

In the olden days, you needed a Mac or PC to load an iPhone with music, videos, apps, calendar data, and contacts info. Nowadays, all that stuff is wireless. It’s perfectly possible to use an iPhone without even owning a computer.

There are still at least two reasons to sync the phone with a Mac or PC, though, and both involve saving money.

First, syncing is a great way to get music files onto your phone if you don’t want to pay for Apple’s $10-a-month Apple Music service. Second, syncing is a free way to back up everything on your phone. (You can back up the phone to iCloud, but that costs money, and furthermore, the data is no longer within your sole control.)

The Death of iTunes

On Windows PCs and Macs running macOS versions that came along before 2019, you can use Apple’s iTunes program on your Mac or PC to load up your phone with music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and audiobooks.

But in macOS 10.15 Catalina, iTunes no longer exists. Apple broke it into three separate apps, called Music, Podcasts, and TV. None of them syncs with an iPhone.

Instead, when you connect an iPhone to your Mac with a cable, its icon and contents show up right at the desktop, in every Finder window.

NOTE

If your iPhone’s icon doesn’t seem to show up in the left-side Sidebar, confirm that the Sidebar heading Locations is expanded (click the Show button, if it’s present). Also open Finder → Preferences → General; turn on External disks and CDs, DVDs, and iPods.