Apple Support:

If iPhone isn’t responding, and you can’t turn it off then on, try forcing it to restart.

1. Press and quickly release the volume up button.
2. Press and quickly release the volume down button.
3. Press and hold the side button.
4. When the Apple logo appears, release the side button.

I upgraded my iPhone 17 Pro to iOS 26.3 this morning (straight from the release version of iOS 26.2 — I skipped the 26.3 betas), and by noon, it was stuck at the lock screen. Pressing and holding the side button and either of the volume buttons at the same time did not bring up the expected screen with “Slide to power off”, “Medical ID”, and “Emergency Call”.

The above force-restart method worked, though. I knew it existed but I’d forgotten how to do it. Luckily, I was sitting right at my Mac, so I had another machine to use to look it up. I’d have been in a jam, though, if I’d been somewhere with only my (stuck) iPhone, so I think this one is worth memorizing.

Step 3, the “press and hold the side button” step, takes quite a few seconds before the screen turns off. So I’m memorizing the process as three steps:

1. Click the volume up button.
2. Click the volume down button.
3. Press and hold the side button, patiently, until the Apple logo appears.

Learn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. This on-demand session covers how to:

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Joanna Stern (last week):

After 12 years with The Wall Street Journal, this is my final column and video as a full-time employee. I’m off to build something new and independent. I’ll still pop up on these pages and at WSJ events from time to time. Can’t get rid of me that easily! Before I go, I wanted to reflect on the past dozen years in tech — in a letter to my first-month-on-the-job self.

The video version of her sign-off column is worth it for the Velveeta gag alone.

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

After planning to include the new capabilities in iOS 26.4 — an operating system update slated for March — Apple is now working to spread them out over future versions, according to people familiar with the matter. That would mean possibly postponing some features until at least iOS 26.5, due in May, and iOS 27, which comes out in September. [...]

In recent days, Apple instructed engineers to use the upcoming iOS 26.5 in order to test new Siri features, implying that the functionality may have been moved back by at least one release. Internal versions of that update now include a notice describing the addition of some Siri enhancements. One feature is especially likely to slip: the expanded ability for Siri to tap into personal data. That technology would let users ask the assistant to, say, search old text messages to locate a podcast shared by a friend and immediately play it.

Internal iterations of iOS 26.5 also include a settings toggle allowing employees to enable a “preview” of that functionality. That suggests Apple is weighing the idea of warning users that the initial launch is incomplete or may not work reliably — similar to what it does with beta tests of new operating systems.

When Gurman began reporting about personalized Siri delays a year ago, his reporting turned out to be exactly right. If these features are going to drop in iOS 26.4, they should be in pretty good shape right now internally. If they’re in bad shape right now in internal builds, it’s really hard to see how they could drop in iOS 26.4. And once you start talking about iOS 26.5 (let alone 26.6), we’d be getting really close to WWDC, where Apple’s messaging will turn to the version 27 OSes.

Something still seems rotten.