I bought an iPhone SE (Gen 2) and installed latest iOS 16 on it.
When connecting to a MacPro 5,1 with 'latest' iTunes 12.8.3.1 running on OS X 10.13.6 I repeatedly get an Update Software popup every time the usb is connected. Secondly the device never showed up in iTunes.
In the update software popup, if proceeding with installation, I have continuously had failure due to 'network error'. That popup by the way comes from an application called MobileDeviceUpdater.app found within a folder within a file called MobileDevice.framework. You can navigate and try opening the app itself by the 'Go to Folder' menu within Finder:
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/Current/Resources
I've tried everything, safe boot, network resets, resetting various system caches, running this updater repeatedly, everything I could think of, reinstalling iTunes... even chatting with Apple Customer Support (I know... so helpful), all to no avail.
As others have shown on this question 'A software update is required to connect your iOS device' there is one hopeful answer to this error and that is installation of XCode Beta which has all the mobile device frameworks!
I gave their solution a try and downloaded XCode 15 Beta 2 with a free developer account.
Lo and behold upon trying to open xcode-beta.app it required Mojave MacOS 10.14 minimum and I don't have a Metal graphics card to do that at this time. Then I got to thinking, what if I could find those pesky mobile device frameworks in the package vs. installing all of XCode as others did in the question quoted above? By opening up the xcode-beta.app, right click, 'Show Package Contents' then searching the 'Contents' folder for "mobile" I found this package:
xcode-beta.app/Contents/Resources/Packages/MobileDevice.pkg
This package was not OS restricted and installed just fine on my system by double-clicking.
I also verified through Pacifist where the package contents went.
Of interest:
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework
There were also a number of other frameworks installed to this PrivateFrameworks folder that may also be important.
And this extension file:
/System/Library/Extensions/AppleMobileDevice.kext
Once the full package was installed (no restart) the iOS 16 device did connect, show up and sync in iTunes and no more update software popup!
So the remaining question is, at a minimum are these two sets of files all that is needed or are all the files needed in that package provided by Xcode beta to get the newer devices functioning with iTunes? What's your experience will this work for you?