For those who’re unfortunate sufficient to finish up with a bricked or unresponsive iPhone, the standard approach to restore it’s to attach it to your Mac or PC and switch the restoration firmware from there to your telephone. However that may be a trouble – you may not have entry to your Mac, for instance – and now, Apple is lastly fixing this concern with the launches of the iPhone 16 and iOS 18.
As noticed by 9to5Mac, you’ll now be capable to restore any system from the iPhone 16 vary by loading Restoration Mode and inserting it subsequent to a different iPhone or iPad. That secondary system will obtain a recent iOS firmware copy and beam it wirelessly to the damaged system.
That makes the restoration course of far easier. There’s no have to discover a working cable or hook up your system to a pc, which means now you can doubtlessly restore your iPhone while you’re away out of your desk or out on the street and don’t have entry to a Mac or PC. In addition to that, it additionally means you’ll be able to keep away from a visit to an Apple Retailer or third-party restore heart, saving you time and, doubtlessly, cash too.
Restricted to iPhone 16 for now
It’s price noting that this technique received’t work with each Apple system. As 9to5Mac says, “Though any system operating iOS 18 can be utilized to revive a bricked system, plainly solely iPhone 16 fashions could be wirelessly restored for now.”
That’s as a result of iPhone 16 telephones include a devoted restoration partition that is ready to handle the restoration even when the principle iOS partition is just not booted. That’s one thing older iOS devices lack.
The report from 9to5Mac says that it’s unclear if Apple will be capable to retroactively add this technique to older gadgets or whether or not it requires new {hardware}. For now, it solely works with iPhone 16 sequence gadgets.
Curiously, this sort of wi-fi restoration has been attainable for some time in different Apple merchandise, together with the Apple Watch and Apple TV. Traces of the restoration system code had been first observed again in 2020 within the iOS 13.4 beta, but it surely’s taken some time for wi-fi restoration to come back to iPhones. However for anybody who will get a bricked iPhone miles from the closest pc, it’s higher late than by no means.
