How do I switch off my broken iphone?
QI have an old iphone 4 that was serving my needs well until the power button became permanently stuck down! I’ve tried everything to dislodge it but it will not move, so I can no longer switch off my iphone. The battery on this old handset is fading, so I like to switch it off overnight to save power – but obviously I can’t do that now. Apple tells me it no longer offers service for this phone. A local repair shop quoted £90 to replace the button, but that’s more than I want to pay for this old thing. Could I take this apart myself to clean out any gunge? Or do you have any other ideas? Michael Grange
ARepairing an iphone 4 is not easy. Specifically, the ifixit website – which is an authority on these matters – rates the task of replacing the iphone 4’s power button as ‘difficult’. You’ll find ifixit’s detailed guide at www.snipca.
com/26155. If you do go down that road you’ll need an appropriate toolkit, as the iphone is secured with a variety of screws. These are cheaply available from the likes of Amazon, such as this £3.70 kit at www.snipca. com/26154.
Once inside, if you’re lucky, a blast from a can of compressed air or bit of (very careful) gunge-scraping with a fine edge might get the button moving again. But it’s just as likely that the mechanism itself is broken. If that’s the case, then the replacement part costs around £3.50 ( www.snipca. com/26156). But remember that ifixit’s rating is that this is an intricate and delicate job.
If you decide this repair is beyond you, the accessibility features built into IOS can help – a bit. From the home screen tap Settings followed by General and then Accessibility. Now swipe to the Physical & Motor section and tap Assistivetouch, then flip the Assistivetouch switch to On.
A ‘floating’ button will appear on screen, which you can reposition just by dragging and dropping. Tapping this button opens a box that provides touchscreen control over your iphone’s physical buttons. Tap Device, for example, and you’ll see a padlock icon labelled Lock Screen (see screenshot): this is the touchscreen version of the Power button. If you tap and hold this for a few moments, the lock screen will appear, just as it would if you held down the physical button. Then, to switch off, just move the ‘slide to power off’ slider all the way to the right.
However, you’ll have a problem when you next need to switch it on, as the physical power button remains broken. There’s no perfect solution to this, but plugging in to charge or sync will bring your iphone 4 back to life.