How to Download iOS 8 for iPhone Without Wiping Everything

Written by Shaun Wheatcroft, Writer for Garden Buildings Direct (Proud customers of TSG)

If like me you have an iPhone, you have probably already tried to download iOS 8 and failed miserably.

Well, don’t give up hope just yet, because there’s a simple way around it that means you’ll only need around 1.2GB of free data to get your Apple fix of iOS!

The download of Apple’s latest operating system update, which launched yesterday (17th September), needs in the region of 5.7GB of free storage just to transfer on to your device.

Considering that iOS 7, which launched exactly a year ago today, only needed 2.9GB of space to install, almost 6GB is a hard hit to take, even for the most avid of Apple worshippers.

Depending on which device you have and what operating system you are currently running, these storage requirements can vary from person to person so take them with a pinch of salt.

Yet, generally if you have between 1.5GB and 2GB of data spare, which should be pretty easy to free up, then you can do exactly what I did to get around the need for more space.

Hold back on deleting all those videos of your dog chasing his tail, photographs of the meal you cooked last March and the app that lets you zip and unzip a zip (yes, this actually exists).

Remember, Apple are branded on the fact they make all their devices “seamlessly sync” for a reason. Just sync your phone with iTunes on your laptop or Mac and download it straight from there to solve the problem.

Here’s how…

It’s simple. Just hook up your phone to your computer via the USB cable attached to your charger and open your iPhone under ‘devices’ through the tab on the left of iTunes. Once there, you can click the ‘Check for Update’ option and iTunes will automatically find the latest iOS 8 and prompt you to download it. Easy.

Just make sure you don’t click the ‘Restore iPhone’ option, as this will totally wipe your phone, which you definitely don’t want to do, especially if you want to keep the fantastic unzip a zip app!

On a more serious note, the real question is, are Apple just trying to push us into buying a bigger more expensive 64GB device next time we upgrade? Of course they are, but they’re doing it very shrewdly. In fact, they’ve even made iOS 8 exclusive for those with an iPhone 4S or newer and iPad 2, leaving any 2010 models behind.

Despite the new iOS 8 introducing cool new features such as time-lapse videos, the ability to send your friends an interactive map of your position and allergy information that can be accessed from the lock screen in case of emergencies; it’s hard for me to see past Apple’s iOS 8 as a package full of money-spinning gimmicks.

However, as Steve Jobs once proclaimed: “Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.”

Do you want iOS 8? Is it the case of newest is always better?