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Your Tech Makeover is a practical tech podcast for everyday people who want clearer answers about phones, passwords, Wi-Fi, smart home devices, online safety, and AI.
If technology often feels harder than it should, you are not alone. Frank Bravo breaks down what matters in plain English so you can make better choices, avoid common mistakes, and feel more confident day to day.
Each episode focuses on one topic you can use right away: backups, scams and phishing, subscriptions, cloud storage, video calls, travel tech, accessibility, and more. The goal is simple: help you get more out of the tech you already own.
New episodes drop every two weeks. Visit YourTechMakeover.com for more information.
00;00;00;14 - 00;00;20;02
Speaker 1
I am pretty sure that somewhere in your house there's an old phone. Maybe it's in a drawer. Maybe it's the desk. Maybe it's in a box in the garage. And the reason it's still there. Unsold. Not donated. Not traded in is because some part of you is not sure how to safely hand it off to a stranger. That instinct is a good one.
00;00;20;02 - 00;00;41;13
Speaker 1
And the thing that makes it safe is the factory reset, which is a phrase a lot of us say, and only a few of us can actually explain. Well, today we're going to talk about what a factory reset is, how to do it, and then how to make sure your device is recycled properly.
00;00;41;16 - 00;01;00;16
Speaker 1
Welcome to your Tech Makeover, the podcast that gives you tips and tricks to help you simplify and get more out of the technology in your life. I'm your host, Frank Bravo. Today's topic is what really happens when you reset your phone and what it doesn't do. And the one step that people skip that turns a perfectly good phone into a brick for their next owner.
00;01;00;21 - 00;01;20;19
Speaker 1
And then we'll talk about what a reset is, the right move. And when it's overkill, it's not as I'm recording this, which is a time where a lot of people are cleaning out closets and figuring out what to do with old devices. It usually happens just before the holidays, so this is good timing. Let me explain what really happens when you do a factory reset.
00;01;20;21 - 00;01;44;27
Speaker 1
People imagine factory resets work a lot like an eraser going over a page, going back and forth over every bit of data on your device until it's gone. Well, if that was true, it would take hours to do it, and it would wonder whether or not everything actually got caught. That's not how it works on modern devices. Your phone is encrypted all the time, which means the data can't be read easily from the moment you set it up.
00;01;44;27 - 00;02;11;27
Speaker 1
This happens. Everything on it. Every photo, every message, every note. It's all scrambled. There's one key that scrambles it all. That key is what your passcode, your face ID, your fingerprints are all protecting. A factory reset destroys that key, making it so that the data is gone. Well, actually, technically, the data is still there on the chip inside the device, but it's permanently unreadable because the only thing that could have turned it back on.
00;02;11;29 - 00;02;31;20
Speaker 1
Let them see your photos, your messages, your apps again, they no longer exist. This is why a reset takes minutes and stead of taking a weekend to get done, and why you can trust it, there's no residue after you do this. There is no clever tool that recovers your pictures afterwards on your device. On a modern iPhone and Android phone.
00;02;31;24 - 00;02;57;04
Speaker 1
Done properly, the old data is really gone and I say done properly because I'm going to come back to that because there's one step that matters more than the reset itself. Now, the part that catches people off guard is exactly this. Your cloud account keeps everything safe. This surprises people constantly, and it works in your favor. A lot of the time when you erase an iPhone, your photos don't vanish from iCloud, and that's a good thing.
00;02;57;08 - 00;03;25;05
Speaker 1
When you wipe an Android phone, your Google Photo library is still untouched. The reset only affects the piece of glass in your hand. Every living thing on the computer. They're all out on the servers somewhere, and that's exactly where you left it. And this is usually good news. It's meant that resetting your phone, while it might seem terrifying, is really easy to get your data back because all you do is you sign in the cloud and then all that stuff comes back onto the device.
00;03;25;11 - 00;03;43;14
Speaker 1
But run that logic in the other direction, and then you'll start to see the problem. If you're resetting your phone because you want your data gone, you've not accomplished this. You've all you've done is remove the one copy that you physically are holding. Your account still has it, and anyone who gets access to your account, they'll have it to a factory.
00;03;43;14 - 00;04;14;05
Speaker 1
Reset is not a privacy eraser on your life, it's a privacy eraser for that one device. And remember that subscriptions keep billing you to. If you're paying for something through the App Store or Google Play. Wiping the phone doesn't absolutely change the subscription that will continue to live in your account. It's not tied to your hardware. This is usually not a problem, because when you get a new device and the subscription will just follow you, but it's a good time to evaluate your subscriptions when you're doing this reset.
00;04;14;08 - 00;04;33;02
Speaker 1
And if you find one that you want to stop and you have to go cancel it. I did a podcast about this back in April. I covered all that and it's a whole episode on canceling subscriptions. Finally, your device stays on your account list. I've seen this before. I log into my account list and there it is. An old device.
00;04;33;07 - 00;04;52;13
Speaker 1
Even after you wipe that device often, it still appears in that list until you remove it. It's not harmful for it to be there, but it's worth tidying up and making it so that it's less confusing. A quick shout out to listeners like you who helped make your tech makeover possible. Your support helps keep this podcast going and I truly appreciate it.
00;04;52;15 - 00;05;12;13
Speaker 1
Want to contribute? Just click the link in the show notes or visit your Tech makeover.com plus as a special thank you. People who give $25 or more will get $25 off a one time consultation with me to help you simplify your tech. Thanks for being part of the Your Tech Makeover community. Now back to what I was saying.
00;05;12;15 - 00;05;35;26
Speaker 1
If you're going to do this, the one thing that you need to be aware of is to make sure you sign out of your accounts first on the device and then erase it, not the other way around. Here's why. Both Google and Apple build in an anti theft feature that ties to your phone and your account. Apple calls theirs the Activation Lock and it comes automatically on when Find My Friends is turned on.
00;05;35;29 - 00;05;59;10
Speaker 1
Google is connected through a factory reset protection. The purpose is that if somebody steals your phone, wiping it doesn't help them because when they power back on, it demands your account and password before they can do anything. A phone in this case would become worthless, and that's exactly what we want. The trouble is, the phone can't tell the difference between a theft and maybe the nephew that you gave your old device to.
00;05;59;16 - 00;06;22;09
Speaker 1
If you wipe the phone while it's still tied to your Apple account, the next time that somebody goes to add a account to it, the Google account or the Apple account will say that they've never heard of it and it will block them. You've basically just handed them a very expensive paperweight. So on an iPhone, before you do anything else, before you actually reset the phone, make sure you go to the settings app.
00;06;22;10 - 00;06;39;29
Speaker 1
Tap the name at the top. Scroll all the way down and tap the sign out button on an Android device. You'll go to the account and remove the Google account on Samsung. Don't forget to remove that Samsung account. Two different Android devices have different settings, so you might want to poke around a little bit to find the right setting.
00;06;40;01 - 00;06;58;18
Speaker 1
And then there's a second detail that trip people up as well. The phone has to be online when you do this. Activation lock does not live on the device. It lives out on the Apple servers, so the phone has to be able to reach them in order for it to release itself. But once you've actually signed out, the actual reset process is pretty easy.
00;06;58;25 - 00;07;21;07
Speaker 1
On the iPhone. You're going to go back to that settings, go to general and then transfer or reset phone and then erase all content and settings on a Samsung device. It's in the settings and then it's the general management and then reset, then factory data reset. Again, different Android devices may be slightly different, so your mileage may vary with these instructions.
00;07;21;09 - 00;07;41;10
Speaker 1
When the reset is done and there's certain times where it is great to do, but also certain times where it's not a good idea. Basically, you'll want to do a factory reset when you're selling the device, donating it, trading it in, or handling it to a friend or somebody else who's going to use it. That's the right time to do that.
00;07;41;10 - 00;08;06;06
Speaker 1
But when the phone is misbehaving in ways that don't make sense, resetting it isn't going to fix it. It's usually the wrong answer when the phone just feels slow. That is the one that I want to push back on, because a lot of times you'll be told, have you reset the phone? And that's standard advice in several hours of work with really no benefit, a phone that just feels slow is more likely to be out of storage, or have a battery that has aged.
00;08;06;06 - 00;08;26;29
Speaker 1
Pass a point where the phone is deliberately throttling itself so that it doesn't have trouble. I did a whole episode on hidden battery drain issues back in March. Check out the storage, check your battery health first ten minutes of investigation on whether or not one of those is the culprit is a lot better than a reset that wouldn't have fixed it anyway.
00;08;27;02 - 00;08;46;29
Speaker 1
Resetting a slow phone would just immediately restore your backup, which is pretty pointless because you've just put everything back on as exactly as it was. Now the device reset. If a device is going to be recycled, then there's a few other things you need to know first, and this should be obvious, but I'm going to toss it out there anyway.
00;08;47;02 - 00;09;05;22
Speaker 1
Don't throw it in the trash or just the recycling that goes in your house. That would be a bad idea because it either ends up in landfill or in the recycling path that isn't really ready to deal with electronics, especially with those batteries inside of it. A better choice is to take it to electronics store who has electronics recycling.
00;09;05;23 - 00;09;26;17
Speaker 1
You know, they're usually in the front of the store, or you can check with your garbage company about how's the best way to recycle them. I know for me, I bring them to the transfer station of our garbage company, and they have bins of all sorts of different kinds of electronics that I can toss them into. Apple also has a trade in program that will take back Apple devices, even if there's no harm to the mobile.
00;09;26;17 - 00;09;46;23
Speaker 1
Leave a note and a link to that in the show notes. And all these choices are safer to recycle your device, and it allows them to then get the raw materials taken out of them and the battery components to be recycled and dealt with properly. So I want to encourage you to go check that drawer or box that I talked about at the top of this episode and let me know.
00;09;46;28 - 00;10;06;19
Speaker 1
Did you find anything to reset and recycle or give it away? I want to know how many of you have one of these devices sitting around, and what's been stopping you from doing something about it? My guess is that the uncertainty of knowing what to do with it is the likely answer. But now you know how to deal with it, so go at it.
00;10;06;22 - 00;10;26;10
Speaker 1
And as always, you. If you have ideas for topics you'd like me to cover on this podcast, please feel free to contact me via email at Frank at your Tech Overcome. That's it for now. Thanks for listening to your tech makeover, if you haven't already. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform so that you don't miss an episode.
00;10;26;14 - 00;10;46;12
Speaker 1
You can visit your Tech makeover.com as well, where you'll find out lots of ways to subscribe. You could also subscribe to my newsletter there so that you're alerted to new content as it's posted. See more information about each episode and more information about me. Until next time, I'm Frank Bravo, and this has been your tech makeover.