My iPhone 4S has never had the software updated on it since purchase (18 months or so).  When the iOS v6 upgrade came out with its debacle on the Maps application, I never bothered.  My experience with my iPhone 3GS was that at some point an iOS upgrade kills the machine, as they keep adding features for newer hardware – the 3GS at some point kind of dies after a software upgrade.  If there’s not really functional needs, who cares about the update treadmill if the phone is working fine?

Anyway, at this point I’m getting more concerned about security related problems, and when this phone dies I think I’m going to replace it with a non-smart phone as I use it less and less.  So, I’m getting ready for an update and seeing the dreaded “you better transfer purchased on your phone” message and not seeing how to do this.  A backup to the local drive creates the curious “where did my backup go” issue – its transferred to the Library in your home directory (the user library), but this is now hidden from you for some mysterious reason in OS X.  Turns out the only way to see the Library now is to use the “GO” menu in Finder, and if you hold down the option key the menu changes to include the Library.  Why the hiding?  There’s nothing intuitive about holding down Option in this menu.

Not that this helps you import into the Library; the files in the local copy are all in some internal backup naming scheme of seemingly random characters.  You couldn’t figure out what to import from there anyway.

So, the simple thing, there is a “transfer purchases” function in iTunes, you have to go under the File menu, select the device, and it shows up there.  Not necessarily easy to figure this out either, if you’ve selected “don’t tell me about this again” in the transfer dialog somewhere back in time.

This knowledge base article was helpful; the Apple Support Group discussions are mostly hacking through the hard to find library folder.