An iPhone that won’t charge properly is more than a little bit frustrating. Before you tear your hair out, take a stroll down out troubleshooting checklist to rule out common causes of charging problems—and, fingers crossed, resolve your issue without sending your phone in for service.
There are a variety of issues that can cause problems when charging your iPhone or iPad, ranging from the easily-solved to the requires-Apple-service. Thankfully, in our experience, the problem is almost always a varying degree of easily-solved. Here are the first things you should try.
Clean Your Lightning Port
We really love the Lighting connector design: there’s no wrong way to put the cable in, it’s very difficult to damage the port itself, and the cable connector is very resistant to damage. The design of the Lightning port, however, does really make it an irresistible crevice for lint and debris to accumulate—especially if you carry your phone in your pocket every day.
Eventually, enough crud can build up in the port that when you insert the lightning cable you’ll fail to see the phone switch over to charging mode. After unplugging it and plugging it back in a few times, you might notice that it starts charging, but all you’ve succeed in doing—if debris is your problem—is packing that lint in tighter. Eventually the plug-and-replug technique won’t work, because you’ll have reached maximum compaction. How do we know? Because, although it took a little over 2 years and a few painful months of on and off charging issues, we eventually cleaned out our Lightning port which led to complete resolution of our charging problems.
How should you clean your Lighting port? You could, if you were playing things by the absolute book, purchase a specialty anti-static cleaning brush like this $5 OXO combination brush and silicone wiper. It’s a great tool for brushing debris out of a dirty Lightning port and not much different from the anti-static cleaning brushes they use at the Apple Store to perform the same task. But, frankly, we’ve had just as luck not playing by the book and using a wooden toothpick. No seriously, look at the photo above as evidence of our last cleaning excursion. A plain old toothpick is a pretty perfect tool: it’s not conductive,…
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