can i safely sync a new iphone 17 Pro Max to a 2017 iMac running on Ventura?

Pocari-Sweat wrote:

Did the side by side transfer of data, took around 5 hours, moved almost everything over inc 102,500 songs. Other things were missing though, Apple TV shows, Apple Books, didn't transfer.

My understanding is that Quick Start doesn't transfer media – music, movies, TV shows. You must load media onto the new phone separately (e.g., by manually synchronizing the new phone with your computer).

This is probably in part a "gimme" to the record companies and Hollywood – same as DRM on very early iTunes Store music purchases, or DRM on iTunes Store movie and TV purchases now.

So I thought the manual downloading of the books and TV shows would eat up a similar amount of space. No. It got jammed/frozen during the wifi downloading of these, so I connected the new phone to my iMac running on Ventura, and it deleted ALL of my music including iTunes purchases and all of my ripped CDs, photos, Apple Books, TV etc all gone.

Manual synchronization is only to one computer / master library at a time. If you synchronize with one computer, then with another, this erases everything loaded onto the iPhone from the first computer.

Decided to delete Music App, remove downloads in books and TV and doing a sync on my Mac, after 9 hours, it's synched approx 8,000 songs, restored photos and been freezing constantly.

I'm not sure what good deleting the Music app – either on the iPhone or on the Mac – would do.

Lastly, my old phone had a sim, now after the transfers, it is showing SOS, it connects to wifi, but i can't use the old phone outside of the house unless I can connect to wifi somewhere whilst this gets worked out.

Contact your carrier (phone company) for help with your cellular service.

If you had them transfer your phone number from your old phone to your new one, the SOS might be completely normal. SOS means that you do not have a connection to your carrier's cellular network, or that there is an issue with your account on it – but that you can still make "Emergency 911" type calls using other carriers' networks.

If your old phone and your new phone are both trying to use the same phone number, and your carrier's records say that the number belongs to the new phone, your carrier's network may simply be rejecting attempts by your old phone to connect, as being inappropriate.

Yes.

Re: “can I safely sync the new phone to the iMac to transfer photos music contacts etc?”

Although you can use manual synchronization for just about everything (see previous reply), I would suggest using it only for purchased music; maybe also for movies and TV shows.

For the other stuff, it’s more convenient to use iCloud-based or email-account-based synchronization.

Pocari-Sweat wrote:

My current iPhone 14 syncs ok, largest memory is from 9000 CDs I’ve loaded onto the Mac over the years and have been able to sync on the 14. It’s about 700Gb of music alone. Occasionally I’ve lost it on the phone but deleting Music and reinstalling it comes back just takes a while.

Manual syncing of music should be a little faster on your iPhone 17 Pro Max.

I believe that the Lightning port on the iPhone 14 is limited to USB 2.0 speed ("up to 0.480 Gbps"). The USB-C port on the 17 Pro and Pro Max models supports USB 3.1 Gen 2 speed ("up to 10 Gbps").

The iPhone 17 Pro Max theoretically can be managed by a Mac running High Sierra (see Technical Specifications). You should not have any problems managing it with one running Ventura.

You're welcome.