Resolved New watch with older firmware

[macphoto861]

When upgrading to a new Apple Watch, in almost all cases the firmware on the new watch is older than the firmware of the old watch, which causes a problem when restoring the new watch from a backup of the old watch.

The way I’ve always dealt with this is to set it up from scratch as a new watch, update the firmware, then unpair/reset it, and finally restore from the old watch backup.

Is this still the only way to handle this? Or is there a less roundabout way?

 

[macphoto861]

Well, cancel that... apparently Apple improved this process, because it prompted me to update the firmware early in the process, eliminating the extra steps of setting it up as a new watch temporarily just to update.

 

[chabig]

Nice! I always did what you previously did.

 

[macphoto861]

Nice! I always did what you previously did.

Follow-up... it was easier than before, but it still didn't go perfectly smooth. It did alert me early in the pairing process that there was an update, and it did indeed install it, but after that was complete and I tried to progress to the next step, where you select the backup you wish to restore from, it still said "update required" or something like that under the backup of my current watch. Tapping on that brought up the standard Software Update screen (which said that I was up to date), so I was pretty much stuck in a loop as far as I could tell... it was like the Watch iPhone app had detected and remembered the version of the firmware that was originally installed on the new watch, and didn't refresh this to recognize that it had indeed been updated to the same version as the backup. I had to cancel the pairing and start it again.