Help, my iPhone won’t charge! 6 tips
Published on 31/05/2019 in Tech, tips & tricks
Just before you go to bed, you plug your iPhone in quickly so that you can get to work with a fully charged battery the next morning. But instead of the familiar ‘ping’, you don’t hear anything at all and the phone doesn’t seem to be charging, either. Don’t panic. With these tips you’ll soon have your phone powered up again.
- Check your battery charger
This may seem to be stating the obvious, but: battery chargers can break, too. And not just battery chargers, for that matter: the charge cable itself won’t last for ever. So plug your phone into another charger or attach your charger to another cable. Cheap imitation cables in particular (which have not been certified by Apple) can sometimes break down completely. So opt for certified battery chargers and charge cables. - Check the Lightning port
If dust or dirt builds up in the Lightning port, after a while your charge cable won’t connect properly to the phone. The safest way to clean the port is with a compressed air spray. Be careful not to break any of the charging pins if you use a toothpick! - Start your iPhone up again
It’s fairly rare, but sometimes your phone refuses to charge due to a software error. So try the oldest but probably most effective trick in technology land: switch your device off and back on again. If your phone no longer responds at all, you can force it to start up (a so-called hard reset) by pressing the on/off button and the home button simultaneously for a few seconds.
From the iPhone 7, you have to press the on/off button simultaneously with the button to reduce the volume. On the iPhone 8 and iPHone X it is different again: here you have to briefly press the volume up button, then briefly press the volume down button and finally press the start button on the other side for longer. - Recalibrate the battery
Has it ever happened to you that your iPhone indicates that the battery is still 40 % full and then twenty seconds later it fails? In that case, you need to recalibrate your battery. You do so by combining step 1 and step 3: connect your phone to a charger and do a hard reset. Then charge the phone fully. - Look! No cables
Do you suspect that your Lightning port has given up the ghost entirely or do you only have one (broken) charger left in the house? With an iPhone 8 or iPhone X there is another remedy: wireless induction charging. For that, of course, you need a special wireless charger. As long as it meets the Qi standard (check the packaging!), this can charge your iPhone. - A new battery
Have you tried all our tips, and nothing works? In that case, it is probably time for a new battery. Luckily that doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. You can have your battery replaced at any official Apple Service Center for € 29 all in.
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