iPhone 11 Max Screen Black or Frozen. Problem Solved!

When we are not traveling or depending on mobile data plans, we try to keep our Apple devices on our local WiFi network with automatic updates selected to make certain the latest version of iOS is always installed. This choice has served us well for many years for many different models of the Apple iPod, iPad, and iPhone.

Well, our luck ran out. During a recent overnight update to iOS on an iPhone 11 Pro, we had what appeared to be a "bricked" device. The iPhone screen was black and no combination of button presses, cable connections, or wireless chargers seemed to be able to wake the phone.

A search through the Apple online support resources surprisingly did not provide much help, so we called Apple Support and received this assistance; information that we were not able to find online.

If your screen is black or frozen, you need to force restart your device. A force restart won't erase the content on your device. You can force restart your device even if the screen is black or the buttons aren't responding.

For iPhone models with Face ID, press and quickly release the Volume Up button. Press and quickly release the Volume Down button. Then press and hold the Side button until the device restarts.

We had to repeat this force reset process several times before the iPhone 11 actually "woke up."

Once awake, the phone needs to complete the failed iOS update process. Plug the phone into a computer with iTunes installed. When you get the option to restore or update, choose Update. Your computer will try to reinstall iOS without erasing your data.

These steps successfully recovered our iPhone 11 Max from the failed iOS update and restored the phone with no data loss. Crisis adverted and problem solved!

Google Admin Console Access Without A Google G Suite Account

Over the years we have created several special-purpose blogs using the convenient Blogger host service from Google. Instead of using the default blogspot.com domain for the blogs' URL, we opted to use Google's domain service to register a unique domain name. Google makes that option incredibly easy, and we greatly appreciated using the feature that is built-in to Blogger instead of having to use a stand-alone domain registration service and then having to edit the various MX records to point back to the Blogger site.

These blogs were only needed for a limited amount of time and we had no desire to keep them active forever. It is easy enough to delete the blog on Blogger. In fact, Google even allows you to download the blog content for posterity before you delete the blog. However, the domain registration lives on and will continue to renew each year if you have provided Google with a valid credit card account.

In Google's domain renewal notices, they instruct you to "sign in to your Google Admin console" to manage your domain registration renewals. This is necessary to either update your payment information or to cancel your domain registration. It would seem that signing on to your Google Admin console would be simple enough. The trouble is, Google requires a G Suite admin account to access the Google Admin console. If you try to use your Gmail account information, you receive the following error message, "admin.google.com is used for G Suite accounts only. Regular Gmail accounts cannot be used to sign in to admin.google.com."

Having created our domain registration within Blogger, we did not have a G Suite admin account, so what were we supposed to do? We scoured the G Suite support pages and made dozens of Google searches and found no clues. Finally, in the G Suite Administrator Community, we found an obscure mention of a special admin account that allows Blogger users to access the Google Admin console to manage their domain registration.

You can use bloggeradmin@yourdomain.com (where yourdomain.com is your domain name) to log into your Google Admin console, even if you don't have a G Suite admin account.

Presto!

This information allowed us to cancel our domain registration services that had been automatically renewing despite our best efforts. We hope it helps you too.