In the past, if you ever needed to restore the firmware of your iPhone as a last resort when your iPhone didn’t behave properly or get bricked, you’d need to connect that iPhone to either a Mac or PC to do so. Now, 9to5Mac discovered that the iOS 18 firmware for the iPhone 16 series includes RecoveryOS, which will finally enable users to restore their iPhone 16 models wirelessly with either a nearby iPhone or iPad running the latest operating systems.
RecoveryOS has also been Apple’s solution to wirelessly recover and restore the firmware of both Apple Watch and Apple TV starting with iOS 15.4/watchOS 8.5 and iOS 17/tvOS 17, respectively. Even the recently launched Vision Pro has the same wireless recovery solution. For now, it seems that only iPhone 16 models can be wirelessly restored as those are shipping with a dedicated recovery partition, so it’s probable that this new wireless solution may be limited to the latest hardware.
Still, this will be a huge win for users who don’t have a Mac or PC nearby, especially if they’re far away from a desktop that stays in a room as opposed to a laptop. This is just another step (if not final) for the iPhone to become more independent of the personal computer, i.e. PC-free, where you can finally “cut the cable”.
