iPhone won't turn on: what you can check yourself

A completely flat battery is the most harmless cause and also one of the most common. When a battery is very deeply discharged, the iPhone shows nothing at all for the first few minutes on the cable, not even the battery icon.

So plug the device into a charger in a wall socket, not into a laptop or a power bank, and leave it alone for half an hour. Use a cable that you know charges another device. A kinked or cheap cable is the cause more often than you'd think.

If the red battery icon or the Apple logo appears after a while, it was the battery. If this happens to you often, or the device simply switches off while it still has charge left, the battery is worn out. There's more on this in the article on battery replacement.

Sometimes the system freezes so badly that the screen stays black even though the device is running. A force restart doesn't delete any data, it just switches the iPhone off hard and back on again. The buttons depend on the model.

This is the most important question, and you can answer it without any tools. Call the iPhone from another phone. If it rings or vibrates, the device is on and only the screen is dark. The same applies if Siri answers or the device vibrates briefly when you plug in the cable.

A second test uses a computer. Connect the iPhone to a Mac or to a PC with iTunes. If it shows up there, it's alive. In that case it's very likely the display or its connector, and your data is safe on the device.

This distinction saves you a lot of worry. A dark display after a drop is a normal display repair, and we don't touch the storage.

If the iPhone is stuck on the Apple logo or shows a cable with a computer icon, the computer offers you two buttons. This is where most avoidable data loss happens, so look closely.

“Update” reinstalls iOS and leaves your data where it is. Always try this first. “Restore”, on the other hand, resets the device to factory settings and deletes everything that isn't in a backup.

If you don't have a recent backup and updating doesn't work, stop at this point. A device that won't start can often still be brought back to life in the workshop just enough to get the data off it. After a restore, that's no longer possible.

There are cases where every further attempt to charge does more harm than good. If you see any of the following signs, leave the device switched off and bring it in.

We connect the device to a tester and see whether it draws power and how much. That tells us whether the battery, the charging port, the display or the logic board is the problem, before anything is opened.

We'll look at your device for free and give you a cost estimate. Then you can decide in your own time whether we repair it. If your photos and chats are what matter most, tell us right when you hand it in. Then data recovery comes first and the repair second.