Scope and refusal

Is this for you?

You will Confirm you have the Mac, iPhone, time, and disk space this course needs before chapter 05.

Before you start None. This chapter is the free preview on the store.

Time 20 minutes read · no hardware yet

Why this matters

This chapter lists what you need on the bench and what you will have when you finish. Read it before you buy cables or block out evenings on your calendar.

What you will build

Picture one Mac with a powered USB hub and a row of iPhones. You learn on phone-01 first: live view in the browser, tap calibration, sample tasks, daily schedule. Then you add phone-02 on the bench, document a four-phone row, and apply the same port pattern to twelve phones or more on paper.

That is the full promise. Everything else in the PDF exists to get you there with clear steps.

What you need before chapter 05

What Phone Farm does on your Mac

Define Phone Farm iOS is a free open-source program (Apache-2.0) that lets your Mac control physical iPhones over USB. You install it on your Mac. It is not a website that rents phones.

You open a dashboard in your browser at http://127.0.0.1:3000 by default. You can change WEB_HOST in chapter 16 if you need the dashboard on your LAN.

Four background programs run at once on your Mac:

You will start all four in chapter 08. If one is missing, schedules never run even when the dashboard looks fine.

What you will do on the bench

What the stack requires

Time and money

Shopping checklist (before chapter 05)

First weeks expectations

If prepare fails twice with signing errors, stop and re-check Team ID in Xcode Accounts before opening a support email.

Try it now

On paper or in Notes, write two sentences:

1. The Mac and iPhone you will use first (names from this course: bench-mac and phone-01).
2. The first evening you can start chapter 05 (Prepare your Mac).

Stop when You can explain to a friend what you will have on your desk when finished, without mentioning jargon they would not know.

If something looks wrong

• You need a cloud phone rental, not a Mac with USB. This course requires your own Mac and cable.
• You cannot install Xcode or free 40 GB disk. Pause until the Mac is ready.

Next: Your desk in plain English explains the parts before you run any commands.