I’ve received quite a few iPhones that have been locked down due to the phone being tied to the ‘Find My iPhone’ app, which is also tied to that person’s iTunes account. Simply put, I didn’t want to reach back out to the individual, have them temporarily change their iTunes password, allow me to successfully disable the ‘Find My iPhone’ feature, and then have them change their iTunes password back…..that’s just too many steps to go through and possibly run into errors (“I swear I did not have caps lock on. I’m not sure how that happened!?” – nobody ever).

So if you want to avoid the headaches and just get the iPhone wiped without bothering anybody, you’ll need to learn how to get into DFU mode. DFU stands for Device Firmware Upgrade, and not some other funny acronym that I’ve heard often. To get into the mode, follow these simple steps:

1. Plug the iPhone into your laptop/desktop with the provided USB cable
2. Power the iPhone down
3. Once it’s successfully powered off, press that ‘Power’ button for 3 seconds.
4. Right after 3 seconds, release the ‘Power’ button and then press & hold the ‘Home’ and ‘Power’ buttons together for 10 seconds. Do a good job counting…
5. Release just the ‘Power’ button, while keeping a good thumb grip on the ‘Home’ button.
6. After 15 more seconds, you’ll get an alert in iTunes stating ‘iTunes has detected an iPhone in recovery mode. You must restore this iPhone…’. At this point, you can simply restore the iPhone to factory defaults. Good job!