Iphone 6 black screen of death

Your best bet is to just place an ad on Craigslist and in the paper in the lost and found sections. If someone tries to claim the phone, have them identify the picture on the lock screen.

I used to work at an Apple Store Genius Bar. We were not allowed to give out any information from our system ever. If you're located in the US and the phone has a SIM, it probably has AT&T as a carrier. They will not be able to give you any info on the phone either.

Just to provide some insight as far as why Apple can't help you contact the whoever might be listed in their system, remember that a computer or iPhone is a transferrable device. We would frequently have customers bring in a device for repair that was purchased secondhand and the original owner's information was still in our system.

Let's say Tommy buys a MacBook Pro and registers it. Later, Tommy sells his MacBook Pro to Kate because he's broke. Kate purchases the MacBook Pro but does not update the registration. A month later, she leaves the computer in an airport and you find it. You take it to the Apple store and they say, "Oh, here is all of Tommy's info. We'll just call up Tommy and he can come get his MacBook back."

Tommy is not a very scrupulous person, and he fails to mention that he sold the MacBook Pro a month ago. He comes and picks it up and now he has Kate's money and his old computer back. Sweet deal, right? So you can see why this isn't something that Apple would be willing to do.

The Apple employee you talked to was not trying to be obstructive when he wouldn't help you out, but there's a lot of liability things at stake here. They were pretty committed to the idea of protecting customer data, sometimes to the point of idiocy when I worked there, so they're pretty much a dead end as far as returning the phone.

Coincidentally, that happened to me just one week ago when Wifi sync died en route. The solution is simple, but totally non-intuitive: do the exact opposite of what feels right, and all will be well (not exactly Apple’s finest hour in UI intuitiveness):

1. Choose “set up as new phone” on the initial screen. In the dialog that pop ups give your phone the name it had before (important – if your case is similar to mine, it will be pre-filled). This will re-register the phone with iTunes sync.
2. Your phone will do an initial sync with all sync options (music, movies, ebooks etc.) disabled except apps, which are set to “sync all” (if you have a lot of apps in iTunes you are not usually syncing to your phone, the initial sync will flood your phone with these. Delete them out of iTunes beforehand, or from the iPhone after the initial sync). Apps already on the phone will not be overwritten and won’t lose their settings.
3. At this point, all media will still be both in Tunes and on the phone, but not in a synchronized state. Re-check all your sync settings. Acknowledge the “all media on this phone will be deleted” warning. Don’t fret: as long as you are syncing with the same iTunes library as before, nothing will be deleted in the next step.
4. Trigger a sync manually. iTunes will compare what is on the iPhone and what it is meant to sync, and will not re-transfer media already on your phone. Once done, both media libraries will be in sync again. One gotcha though: make sure the downsample setting on the first option page is set as it was before (i.e. on if you downsample music to 128 Kb/s in sync, off otherwise), or you music will be re-synced because bitrates do not match – quite a pain if you have a large library.

After that, your phone will be back ins sync without undue hassle (i.e. worrying about out of date backups in iTunes, iCloud restore etc.).