118 MACWORLD AUGUST 2019
HELPDESK MAC 911WHEN iTUNES SAYS TO
“RESTORE YOUR IPHONE,” DO
YOU HAVE TO?
You have a perfectly functioning iPhone
and you plug it via USB to a Mac. When
you switch to iTunes, you see the
message:
iTunes cannot read the contents of the
iPhone “phone name”. Go to the
Summary tab in iPhone preferences
and click Restore to restore this
iPhone to factory settings.Depending on how
recent your last iTunes or
iCloud backup of your
device is, this might be a
little panic inducing. Do
you really need to restore
your phone?
It’s unlikely. I and others
have routinely experienced a bug
in which this message appears even when
our iPhones (and iPads) are perfectly fine.
The solution is extremely simple: quit
iTunes and relaunch it. If that transient bug
is what you’re experiencing, iTunes now
properly recognizes your iOS device.
Other people have had a harder time
of it, but there are more possibilities you
can try before resorting to restoring your
iPhone or iPad, especially when you’re
see no errors except from iTunes.
> Restart your iPhone.
> Restart your Mac.
> Reinstall iTunes from Apple’s official
iTunes download page (go.macworld.
com/dwit). (This won’t erase your iTunes
media files.)
You can also create a new account in
macOS to test if the problem is your
device or iTunes in your main account. Log
into this other account, plug in your iOS
device, and see if iTunes recognizes it and
shows its contents. If so, the
problem isn’t the phone or
tablet. This may point to a
file corruption issue. Kirk
McElhearn, an iTunes
guru, documents how to
rebuild an iTunes library
on his blog (go.macworld.
com/rbil).
Some iOS device
owners have tried all of the
above, and still experienced
problems. In some of those cases, deleting
a song from the Music app appears to
rebuild an internal iOS directory, which
eliminates the problem the next time the
phone is connected to iTunes.
Finally, in what appears to be a very
small number of cases in which the iOS
device works on its own, but iTunes
produces this error, you will have to
restore your iPhone or iPad to get the
message to stop appearing and use your