There Is a New Way to Force Restart IPhone 8 – Here’s How to Do It
Apple is quickly ditching the classic iPhone home button we all know and love. Last year, the iPhone 7 replaced the physical button with a touchpad and haptic feedback, and in the upcoming iPhone X, it is completely removed in favor of a futuristic face-scanning camera .
Ditching the Home button also means looking for a new way to force restart your iPhone as the old method no longer works. Here’s how to manually restart your new iPhone 8 if it stops working, as well as a few other more drastic options if even that doesn’t fix something wrong with your phone.
How to Force Restart iPhone 8 or iPhone 8 Plus
9to5Mac has a helpful tutorial on how to manually restart iPhone 8 with a video tutorial, but it’s a little tricky. You will need to quickly press and release the volume up button, then do the same with volume down, and finally hold the side button (formerly known as the sleep / wake button) to force a restart.
This should all take a little over 10 seconds. If successful, the screen will go black and then the Apple logo will appear on it when the iPhone 8 starts to reboot.
What to do if forced restart doesn’t work
If your iPhone 8 is frozen or locked and force restarting doesn’t help, you still have other options before contacting your nearest Apple Store for help.
The first is Recovery Mode, which requires your iPhone to be connected to the Mac. Connect it using a USB or Lightning cable. Then do a forced restart, but keep holding the side button even after you see the Apple logo on the screen. Eventually you will see an icon telling you to connect to iTunes. At this point, you can release the side button and then launch iTunes, where you can update or restore your iPhone 8 software. When you’re done, hold the side button again until the Connect to iTunes icon disappears.
If that still doesn’t solve the problem, you may need to change the firmware on your iPhone 8 using a device firmware update. To enter DFU mode, connect your phone to your computer and force restart. When the screen turns black, continue to hold the Side button while holding the Volume Down button for 5 seconds. Then release the side button but hold down the volume down button for another 10 seconds.
The screen will remain black and you will be able to launch iTunes on your computer. If that worked, you should see the message “iTunes has detected an iPhone in recovery mode. You must restore this iPhone before it can be used with iTunes. ” When you’re done, do a hard restart to get your iPhone back to normal use.
Watch the video below for more help, and if you still can’t get your iPhone to work, you can always contact the Apple Store for personal support.