The iPhone’s white apple of death - and how to fix it

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
by lepton

Have you experienced the dreaded white apple of death on your iPhone or iPod Touch? It’s caused by a crash in the software that keeps the device from restarting properly. All you see on the device is a black screen with a white Apple logo in the middle, and the device never gets to the Home screen.

The first time this happened to me, my iPhone 3G was running OS 2.0 and doing just fine that morning, but at one point I felt the phone being unusually warm in my pocket. I took it out, and there was the white apple of death!

Another time, running 2.0.1 I was syncing the phone with iTunes. It was proceeding normally, status messages were saying it was updating this app, and that app, (updates were available for some of the applications I had gotten from the App Store) and right in the middle of this, the white screen of death appeared!

The black screen with the white Apple logo appears as part of the normal starting up sequence for the device. If you turn your device completely off by holding the sleep/wake button long enough for “Slide to power off” to appear, and you do that, and then press sleep/wake again to restart it, you will see the white apple, followed in a moment or two by the regular Home screen.

If there is a severe crash of some software in your device that the system can’t recover from, the device will try to restart itself. If during the white apple part of starting up, where the low level stuff is beginning to run, a problem appears, it can stay stuck on this screen forever, presumably trying and failing again and again to recover.

Is your device ruined? Probably not. Some software most likely wrote in some parts of memory it wasn’t supposed to, overwriting some important part of software or data that the system needs. This could happen from a nasty bug in some software, the operating system, or goodness knows what. But the important thing, is that this is very, very likely a software problem, and that means it can be fixed by restoring the software. Luckily, this is something we can do right at home.

If you get the so-called “white apple of death”, first just sit and wait for five minutes. Perhaps something happened, the device restarted itself, and it will start up normally in a moment. But if it is sitting there for more than five minutes, and getting warm, you might be experiencing the problem.

First, I would try to restart the device. If that fails, you will have to try a “Forced Recovery”. This procedure is very likely to fix everything, but the downside is, it takes a long time since it causes a full restore of all your software and data, and it restores things to the state they were in the last time you completed a successful backup in iTunes. More than likely, you did a backup last night, since iTunes does them automatically when you sync your device. So don’t fret, eventually you should get back to full operating, and nothing lost other than today’s stuff, and maybe even some of that is fine. For example, if you use MobileMe and you entered some calendar or address book stuff, it probably synced to the MobileMe “cloud” at me.com and will be safely restored.

I won’t go through the procedure here. Instead, I’ll refer you to my previous Lepton’s Blog post” “Fixing a frozen, zonked, or dead iPhone or iPod Touch“. Just follow the link and that post explains all the ways to restart or restore your device. You’ll probably end up doing the “Forced Recovery” but check out all the procedures in order, maybe some lesser one will save you.

Good luck, and lets hope future updates to the operating system and applications will banish the white apple of death forever!

Tweet This