How to Turn Off iPhone (The Slider Isn't the Only Way)

Hold the side button on a modern iPhone and Siri wakes up. Hold it together with a volume button and three sliders appear, one of which will call 999 if you keep holding. Somewhere in that sequence is the thing you actually wanted, which was simply to switch the phone off.

So I went looking for how to turn off iPhone the way a normal person would, by typing it into Google. Roughly 18,000 people a month in the UK search that exact phrase. Not one result on the first page tells them the answer.

Here are the three routes Apple actually supports, the models its own troubleshooting page forgets, and the reason that press-and-hold sits one beat away from an emergency call.

What Page One Actually Gives You

I pulled the live UK results while writing this. Below the AI summary, the video carousel and the People Also Ask box there are six organic results. By my count, none of them is about turning an iPhone off.

• The top result is a Vodafone device guide for an iPhone 13 running iOS 18. Right action, two hardware generations and two iOS versions out of date.
• Second is a Reddit thread asking how to turn off a yellow setting. That is the low power mode battery icon, not the phone.
• Third is a genuine Apple Support page, about the torch.
• Fourth is a paid answers site discussing screen timeout on an iPhone 15 Plus.
• Fifth and sixth are YouTube videos about Screen Distance and lock screen notifications.

Apple's own page, Turn iPhone on or off, is not on page one at all. Its summary line names three routes: the buttons, Settings, and Control Centre. Page one teaches none of the three. That is the gap, and it is the only reason this post needed writing.

How to Turn Off iPhone With the Buttons

On any iPhone with Face ID, and on iPhone 8 and iPhone SE from the 2nd generation onward, press and hold the side button and either volume button together. Let go the instant the sliders appear, then drag the power slider at the top of the screen to the right.

Both things that go wrong here are about letting go. Holding the side button on its own summons Siri rather than the power slider, because that button became the Siri shortcut and a decade of muscle memory never caught up. Holding both buttons past the point where the sliders appear does something you very much do not want, which I will come back to.

On iPhone 6s, iPhone 7 and the original iPhone SE, the old behaviour survives intact: hold the top or side button on its own until the slider appears, no volume button involved. If you learned to turn off an iPhone before 2017 and it stopped working, this is why.

Settings, General, Shut Down

This is the route worth committing to memory, because it touches no buttons whatsoever. Open Settings, tap General, scroll to the very bottom of a long list, and tap Shut Down. The same slider appears and you drag it across.

It is the answer to a dead side button, a stiff third-party case that has swallowed the volume rocker, and every version of the question "how do I turn my iPhone off without pressing anything". Apple has documented it for years. It appears nowhere on page one, which tells you how little the results reflect what people are actually stuck on.

General is a menu most people never scroll to the end of, which is a shame, because several defaults worth changing live in there. Predictive text is one of them, a few taps further in under Keyboard.

The Control Centre Power Button

There is a third route that arrived with iOS 18 and that almost nobody uses. Swipe down from the top right corner of the screen, then press and hold the power icon in the top right of Control Centre. The power slider appears. Press and hold, not tap, or nothing happens at all.

It is the quickest of the three once you know it exists, and it is the one that surprises people most, because Control Centre is somewhere most of us only ever visit for the torch and the brightness slider.

When the Slider Won't Move

A properly frozen iPhone will not give you a slider, because the part of the system that draws the slider has stopped responding. That is what a force restart is for, and the gesture depends entirely on which iPhone you are holding.

Apple's instructions for an unresponsive iPhone are to press and quickly release volume up, press and quickly release volume down, then press and hold the side button until the Apple logo appears. Two quick taps, then a long hold. Getting the rhythm wrong is the usual reason it seems not to work.

The Models Apple's Own Page Leaves Out

Here is the part I found genuinely irritating. That article splits into exactly two headings, "iPhone with Face ID" and "iPhone with Home Button". Under the Home Button heading it names iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, then iPhone 6s and earlier, and stops. My reading of the page: iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and every iPhone SE from the 2nd generation onward are named nowhere on it.

Those phones all have a Home button, so their owners follow the Home Button heading in good faith, find only iPhone 7 and iPhone 6s, and try the wrong gesture. The correct one for them is the Face ID gesture: volume up, volume down, hold the side button. Plenty of SE 2 and SE 3 handsets are still in daily use here, and the page's own structure quietly routes every one of them to the wrong answer.

One thing that page also does not say: a force restart is not a graceful shutdown. Nothing gets the chance to save first, so anything unfinished in an open app can go with it. Use the slider whenever the phone is responsive and save the button gymnastics for when it is not. And a force restart erases nothing at all, so if you are passing the phone on, wiping it properly is a separate job.

If the phone refuses to come back on after a force restart, suspect the battery before the software. Checking its health takes about a minute and will tell you whether you are looking at a service appointment or a software problem.

The UK Part: That Hold Is Also How You Call 999

Apple's Personal Safety guide gives this instruction for making an emergency call: "press and hold the side button and either volume button until the sliders appear and the countdown on Emergency SOS ends, then release".

Read that against the instruction for switching the phone off and they are the same gesture. The only difference is when you let go. Release as the sliders appear and you get the power slider. Keep holding through the countdown and your iPhone dials 999.

There is a siren and a visible countdown, so it is difficult to do in complete silence. It is very easy to do inside a coat pocket, or while fighting a case that needs more force than the buttons were designed for. If you would rather the hold never did that, Settings then Emergency SOS has a Call with Hold and Release switch you can turn off, and Apple keeps a separate option that starts a call from five quick presses of the side button, so turning it off does not leave you without emergency dialling.

Not one page-one result mentions any of this. Apple documents the power-off gesture on one page and the emergency-call gesture on another, and never points out that they are the same movement separated by about two seconds of holding.

Questions People Actually Ask

How do I turn off my iPhone without using the buttons?

Open Settings, tap General, scroll to the very bottom and tap Shut Down, then drag the slider. It needs no buttons at all, which makes it the route to use when a side button has failed or a case is blocking the volume rocker. It is worth learning before you need it rather than after.

Why does holding the side button open Siri instead of turning my iPhone off?

On iPhone 8 and later, a long press on the side button on its own is the Siri shortcut. To get the power slider you need the side button and either volume button held together, then released as soon as the sliders appear. On iPhone 7 and older the side or top button alone still works, which is why advice written for those models no longer matches newer phones.

Does turning off my iPhone delete anything or reset it?

No. A normal shutdown keeps everything exactly where it was. A force restart also keeps your data, although anything unsaved in an app that was open can be lost, since nothing gets the chance to write to disk first. Erasing the phone is a completely separate action further down in Settings and it will not happen by accident.

My Take

Three routes, about ten seconds each to learn, and only one of them keeps working when the hardware does not. That makes Settings, General, Shut Down the one to remember, even though it is the slowest, because it is the only one you can still use with a broken button and a case you cannot get off.

But the thing I would actually tell someone is the 999 detail. A query with 18,000 monthly searches behind it, and the most useful fact about the gesture is not on page one, not in the AI summary, and not on the same Apple page as the instruction itself. Learn where to let go.

Source: Turn iPhone on or off, Apple Support