Prepare Devices

Click on the Prepare icon.

Tip: If you have any devices connected to the Mac, you will see a number indicator on the upper-right of the Prepare icon.

The Prepare screen has two sections, “Settings” and “Apps”.

Settings:

Name:

Device name that will be set. Defaults to a “No change”. You have the option to start at any number, just enter one, and click on the Number sequentially tick box.

Supervision:

Set this to OFF if you want to configure a device once. Set it to ON if you want to reapply a configuration repeatable, and also bring the device to a known state every time it is connected.

If you selected Supervision OFF, you can also select No Change. This doesn’t appear to be possible with Supervision ON.

iOS:

Defaults to Latest, so you can upgrade automatically. You can choose Other, and point to a .ipsw file. The application will download the latest .ipsw automatically for every device type connected if Supervision is used.

Restore:

To install a backup to multiple devices choose it from the list. Please note that the “Don’t Restore Backup” when Supervise is ON will still erase all content and settings.

If you set Supervision to OFF, then you can select “Back Up”, if you want to back up a connected device with no Supervision features. Otherwise you need to configure a Supervised device first. iTunes backups can also be used for un-Supervised devices. Also to make it easy to restore, make a “master” device with the iOS Setup Assistant already completed, and you can then use the Prepare function with Supervise OFF to setup multiple devices with the same backup and let it install the same profiles and application on each one.

Profiles:

Import an existing .mobileprofile file created previous with iPCU or “Create new Profile” right in the Apple Configurator. The v1.0 version has all the same iPCU settings as in the recent v3.5.

Apps:

In the “Apps” section you can browse or drag’n’drop .ipa files (for example from Home->Music->iTunes->iTunes Media->Mobile Applications if you transferred purchases from a device or a in-house developed application from Xcode).

If you add an application that is not free of charge or in-house developed a prompt for the Apple Volume Purchase Program (VPP) voucher codes will appear. Dismiss all prompts. You can then click on the “0” icon and import your VPP vouchers purchased for the selected AppStore application. The spreadsheets can be downloaded with your VPP account at any time from http://vpp.itunes.apple.com. Once you have imported your codes, the number will decrement as the codes are used on the devices and you can track on which device they have been used on.

After reviwing all settings, click PREPARE and all connected USB devices will update with a progress status.

ISSUES:

There are things to polish in Apple Configurator, but this is still version 1, so hopefully next update will fix/add new functionality

If any of the devices has a lock code, you may have to remove it before PREPARE
In my testing, I could’t do PREPARE will all settings at one. I had to update to the latest IOS as a first step, and then restore from BACKUP (from my master backup) and apply .mobileconfig files as second