We’ve been seeing more and more of these iPhone 11 no backlights lately. Basically, the backlight goes out after a screen repair mainly because the battery is not disconnected during the repair. It’s been happening since the iPhone 6s and it seems like it’s still happening with the latest iPhone versions with LCD screens. iPhones with OLED screens aren’t affected by backlight issues because the technology is different with these screens. iPhone with OLED screens include the iPhone X, XS, XS Max, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max. Although, even those phones have after market LCD screens now.
Anyways, good news is that we can repair iPhone 11 backlight issues. What makes it a little more challenging is that the iPhone 11 is the first phone with a sandwiched logic board that uses an LCD screen.
The best way to identify an iPhone 11 no backlight problem is to shine a bright light in the middle of the screen, then look for some sort of image. You should be able to see an icon or the apple logo or maybe a battery charging symbol, similar to this:
In the picture above, when a bright light is shined on the screen, you can see a faint apple logo, which tells us that the lcd is working, but the backlight is not.
In order to fix the backlight on an iPhone 11, we need to take the logic board out of the frame, partially remove the shield that covers the backlight components on the logic board, then take off and replace the two backlight resistors (aka backlight filters) that are blown.
- iphone 11 logic board
- iphone 11 backlight resistor (filter)
- iphone 11 backlight resistor (filter)
The pictures above show the location of the backlight resistors. There are two of them. Both resistors will need to be replaced. Since we don’t know the exact values of the resistors, we can just use the iphone 8 backlight resistors as they should be comparable.
The only thing to note about this repair is to be careful removing the shield that covers these backlight resistors. Since the logic board is sandwiched, any heat applied to the logic board will most likely separate the two logic boards, then you’ll have other problems on your hand. The best way to get access to these backlight resistors is to use some sharp micro cutters and snip away the shield without using heat. You can watch a video of our iPhone 11 backlight repair on youtube.
