Importing iphone contacts to new macbook air address book

Question

I haven't discovered a way to get all my iphone contacts onto my macbook air address book - can anyone advise how this can be done?

Answer 1

What you want to do is first be very careful when following these steps, and second, make sure your iPhone has been synced with the computer it was set up with originally so it makes a backup of the data.
To force the iPhone to back up, plug it into the computer it was synced with originally, right click on the iPhone from the list, and select Back Up.
Once you have backed up your iPhone data, follow these next steps -- it can be scary, but you'll be fine, that's why you backed up before hand:
*First off, you want the contacts to be locally on the phone, not on an exchange server or mobileme, etc, to do this follow these steps:*
1) In your iPhone settings, go to mail contacts calendars, select the account that has your contacts, slide the bar for contacts OFF.
2) A dialog will come up asking if you want to delete the contacts from the iPhone, and you choose NO.
That step will copy the contacts from your exchange or mobileme server locally onto the iPhone.
*Secondly you will then sync it with the new Air by following these steps:*
1) Plug the iPhone into the Air, and when it asks to erase and sync choose no.
2) Go to the Info tab and select the checkbox for Sync Address Book Contacts -- DON'T CHOOSE ANY OPTIONS NEAR THE BOTTOM THAT SAY TO REPLACE INFO ON THE DEVICE.
3) Click Sync, and allow the info to sync. It may give an option to Merge or replace, make sure to press Merge.
*Once you're done syncing again, you can re-enable the contact syncing again:*
1) Go back to the settings on your iPhone/iPad, and mail, contacts, calendars, then to the account you turned off the contact syncing on. Turn the contact syncing on again, this time since you just want what's on the server, choose to delete the contacts from the device. You can also choose to merge the contacts if there's stuff you had on the Air that you wanted back on the exchange server.
Enjoy!
Oh and these steps work for calendar information as well.