Password · guide

How to factory reset iPhone without password or computer: 3 ways

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 7 September 2026 · 16 min read

How to factory reset iPhone without password or computer: from the Lock Screen, tap Forgot Passcode?, then Start Reset, then Erase. It needs iOS 15.2 or later, Find My already on, a live connection — and the Apple Account password, which is the condition the short answers leave out.

1. Before anything else, check whether you changed the passcode in the last three days. Apple’s first route erases nothing: “When you change your passcode in iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and later, Passcode Reset gives you 72 hours during which you can still access your iPhone or iPad using your previous passcode.”
2. To use it: after five wrong attempts, tap Forgot Passcode?, then Enter Previous Passcode. Apple’s sequence, in its words: the “[Device] Unavailable” screen appears, “tap Forgot Passcode? in the bottom corner”, then “Enter your old passcode, then follow the onscreen instructions to set a new passcode”.
3. If that is not available, check the four things the no-computer route requires. Apple lists them under What you need: iOS or iPadOS 15.2 or later, “Find My previously enabled on your device”, “an active cellular or Wi-Fi connection”, and “your Apple Account and password”. All four, not any of them.
4. Reach the Security Lockout screen deliberately. “From your device’s Lock Screen, try to enter your passcode until the ‘[Device] Unavailable’ screen appears. When you’re able to, tap Forgot Passcode?” On iOS 15.2 and 16 the button says Erase [Device] instead.
5. Tap Start [Device] Reset, then sign out of the Apple Account. This is the step the short answers leave out: “Enter your Apple Account password to sign out of your Apple Account on your device.” Without that password there is no way past this screen.
6. Tap Erase [Device], and understand what that sentence means. Apple: “permanently delete all of your data and settings”. There is no partial version of this route, and no way to look at anything first.
7. If you use an eSIM, deal with it before you start. Apple’s warning applies to the older software: “If you’re using an eSIM on iOS 16 or earlier, contact your carrier before trying these steps and ask for a QR code to set up your eSIM again.” On iOS 17 or later you can “choose to keep your eSIM and erase your data”.
8. Only if neither works, use a computer. Apple’s third route is recovery mode with a Mac or a Windows PC, a cable and “up to 60 minutes”. It is last in Apple’s order because it needs the most and gives back no more than route two does.

Apple puts the routes in an order, and it is not the order they get tried in. All three of its pages carry the same sentence: try Passcode Reset first, then the device itself, then a computer. The first route is the only one that keeps your photos, and it is the one with a deadline attached, because it exists for exactly three days: “Passcode Reset gives you 72 hours during which you can still access your iPhone or iPad using your previous passcode”. If you changed the passcode this week and then could not recall the new one, that is your route and it costs nothing.

The condition that decides everything is not on the phone. Under “What you need” for erasing without a computer, Apple lists four things, and the fourth is “your Apple Account and password”. That single line is why the popular summary of this job is misleading: the passcode can be got around, the account password cannot. If you know it, all three routes work. If you do not, none of them finishes, and the handset is not the thing that needs fixing.

Why the Forgot Passcode? button is sometimes not there at all. Apple gives the conditions twice, in the same words on two pages: the option appears “when you are locked out, connected to a cellular or Wi-Fi network, signed into your Apple Account, and have Find My turned on”. A phone with no signal and no known network is therefore a phone that has to go to a computer, and a phone that never had Find My switched on has to go to a computer as well. Neither state can be changed from the Lock Screen.

What the erase does not do. It does not remove Activation Lock, it does not release the device from the Apple Account it was signed into, and it does not settle an eSIM. Apple describes the lock as a server-side check — “each time an iPhone or iPad is activated or recovered, the device contacts Apple to check whether Activation Lock is turned on” — so the state travels with the account rather than with the hardware. Selling a phone therefore has an order: sign out of the Apple Account, then erase.

The three routes, their conditions, the 72-hour window, the eSIM warning and the wording of every button are quoted from four Apple support pages, read on 7 September 2026: the ones on Passcode Reset, on erasing without a computer, on recovery mode and on Activation Lock, each linked in full below. The second-hand device check is quoted from CTIA’s Stolen Phone Checker, read the same day. The judgement about which route to try first is Apple’s, not ours.

Not covered here. It does not cover an iPhone supervised by an employer or a school. That is a managed device with its own removal rules, and the route runs through whoever manages it — a managed iPhone is the page for that.

It does not cover Apple Watch, Mac or Apple Vision Pro, each of which Apple documents separately even though Activation Lock covers all of them.

And it does not describe any way past Activation Lock. There is not one that we can document from Apple, and a page that claimed otherwise would be selling something. What holds instead is simple: every route, condition, deadline and button name on this page is quoted from Apple’s own support pages with the date each was read, and the one condition that decides whether any of it works — the Apple Account password — is quoted rather than summarised.