I always remember something I heard from Apple itself: for them, there is no task of repairing the device or solving problems encountered by the user. For them, the task is to improve the relationship that the user has with Apple devices. At first I dismissed it as corporate jargon, but the years of training I have behind me have shown me that it really does improve student morale a lot when you let them see that their iPhone is able to work for them.
And with the experience I have accumulated, I have made a list of The most common errors I usually encounter on iPhones, iPads and Macs of my students. Whether it’s resolved quickly or not depends on the size of the problem, but these are the issues I look at first, knowing they will most likely be there.
“My iPhone has free space, but it tells me it can’t hold any more photos”
When you are not clear about the concept of cloud storage, several confusions arise about how many files you can save on your iPhone. The most common is the one that causes photos to automatically activate in iCloud and the camera roll tries to download into the scarce 5 GB of free space available.
Sure, your iPhone might have 512GB of local storage, but that’s no use if you fill up 5GB of iCloud and find yourself flooded with dozens of prompts to free up space. The solution goes through disable photos in iCloud or subscribe to an iCloud+ plan depending on the student’s preferences.
“We all use the same password for convenience”
This is probably the worst mistake you can make: use the same Apple ID on multiple family members’ iPhones and iPads. This is usually done out of laziness, to remember a single password. But you end up seeing how a phone call rings everywhere and the data of all family members ends up merging into one iCloud. Absolute chaos.
The solution is to create an Apple ID for each person and, if necessary, link them all to the Family Sharing feature. Setting everything up takes some work, I won’t deny that, but the control and peace of mind you’ll gain later is worth it.
“My Mac calendars don’t appear on my iPhone”
Another typical situation. Someone uses their iPhone calendar extensively to write down tasks and events, but you don’t see any of these events in Mac calendar. And yes, iCloud is perfectly configured to sync this calendar everywhere.
What’s happening is that this person has set up an external email service (such as Gmail) without realizing that they have also enabled calendar for that service. So you use Google calendars that you have active on the iPhone but not on the Mac.
The solution here is to set up Google Calendar on the Mac or merge iCloud calendars on the iPhone so that everything syncs properly.
“All my files are missing from my desktop!”
I recently had to deal with a case like this at odd hours. Macs can sync your Desktop and Documents folders so that they contain the same data on every Mac you use. Who doesn’t realize that this deletes files from a desktop without wanting it to be reflected everywhere. You can imagine the panic attack this causes when the user sees what is happening.
In addition to reassuring the user, you have to cross your fingers to recover the deleted files (perhaps the recycle bin has not been emptied or there is a recent backup) and disable the synchronization of the Desktop and Documents folders via iCloud Drive. This is generally one of the cases that causes the most “tragedies”.
Fixing these types of common errors is usually a first step so that someone who is overwhelmed or even angry with their Mac reconciles with it. Make him see that Apple services are not as hostile as he thought, and that you just need to understand how they work to be able to work well with them. As systems evolve, more and more errors of this type will appear, but it is a matter of adaptation.
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