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My iMac and iPhone XS will not pair

My iMac 27" (2017) will not pair with my iPhone XS

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 12.1

Posted on Feb 4, 2022 9:49 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 4, 2022 10:08 PM

What do you mean by, “will not pair”? Are you attempting to pair your iPhone XS with your iMac by using Bluetooth? This will not work since these two devices cannot be paired by using Bluetooth.


Axel F.

6 replies

Feb 7, 2022 3:23 AM in response to Axel Foley

In my case it is a 2019 iMaC (Monterey 12.2) and an Iphone 12 (iOS 15.3). both also run Norton, and the latter is connected to VPN but the iMac is not, as it wants some password I have no idea of.


By 'not pairing', I mean when connected with a lighting cable to a USB port, the iPhone will show up in Finder, but nothing asks for trusting of either device. iMac never reads content of phone and never goes to screen where you can add things and back it up.


After rebooting everything, it did the same thing, but gave an error message in Finder to the effect of :

'The content of iphone 12 cannot be read. Click to restore phone to factory settings.' It did say how much unused space there was on the phone (>100GB).

Did that, smelling a Norton rat, and still no joy.

Brian B.

Feb 8, 2022 4:55 AM in response to Axel Foley

I was trying to avoid bypassing protection I pay for, so yes, that is what I meant about a 'Norton rat'. While iMac said it was Monterey 12.2, when I went to check if there was an OS update, it led me into an hours long process of updating to 12.2, or so it said.

After probably some ISP issues in my neighborhood associated with this update, it did finally finish the Monterey update. Today it will pair to the iphone 12 and let me add some music and back it up, without having to spike Norton.

Feb 8, 2022 5:58 AM in response to Blackwbg

Blackwbg wrote:

I was trying to avoid bypassing protection I pay for

Norton is providing exactly zero protection. It's worthless on a Mac or iOS device.

There are no known viruses in the wild that can effect an up to date installation of macOS or iOS.

If you're using a VPN to access the Internet, as opposed to connecting securely to a private corporate network, that also is not giving you anything in the way of protection. It is, in fact, doing more to compromise your privacy than protect it.

My iMac and iPhone XS will not pair

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