It’s widely known that a reset of your iPhone can do wonders if your device is freezing, giving you errors, or has completely stopped responding. With the introduction of the iPhone 7 and its Force Touch-based Home button, the way you reboot your iPhone has changed a bit. In this how to, we’ll cover how to do a hard reset of your iPhone 7/7 Plus, and how to put it into DFU mode if needed.
ATTENTION: This “how to” is strictly for iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus owners, so if you own an earlier version of the iPhone, return to your regularly scheduled programming.
How to Reset an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus
- Press and hold the iPhone 7’s power button, which is found on the right side of the device.
- While still holding the power button down, press and hold the Lower volume button on the left side of the handset.
- Hold both buttons. The screen will go blank and then display the Apple logo. Let go of the buttons. The iPhone will complete the rebooting process, and will display the lock screen in a few moments.
How to Activate DFU Mode on an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus
- Turn your iPhone completely off. (Hold the device’s power button on the right side of the device until the on screen prompt displays to turn off the device. Follow the on screen prompts.)
- Connect your iPhone to a Mac or PC running iTunes, via the device’s Lightning to USB cable.
- Run iTunes
- Hold down on the power button on your iPhone for three seconds, and then, while still holding it, press and hold the lower volume button, and keep holding both for 10 seconds. The screen should remain blank. If you see the Apple logo display on the screen, you’ve held it too long.
- Release the power button, but keep holding the lower volume button for another 5 seconds. If you see the “Plug Into iTunes” dialog on your iPhone’s screen, you’ve held it too long. (If it helps, use the old “1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi…” trick to count off the seconds.)
- You should see a dialog appear on your Mac or PC screen saying: “iTunes has detected an iPhone in recovery mode. You must restore this iPhone before it can be used with iTunes.”
- At this point, you can reinstall iOS.
If you’d like, you can exit DFU mode by holding both the lower volume button and the power button simultaneously until the Apple logo is displayed on your iPhone’s screen.
