IPhone – Test iPhone SE without a battery. Possible

Yes it is possible, but consider the consumption and Costs.

How much electricity does it take to power your iPhone for a year?

The answer: 1 kWh.

This is the amount of electricity you’d need to power ten 100-watt incandescent light-bulbs for an hour.

Far from anything worth being sheepish over, 1 kwh costs about 12 cents.

To be specific, your iPhone battery holds a charge of 1,440 mAh, or about 5.45 watt hours. If you fully drained and recharged your phone everyday, then over the course of a year you would have to feed it about 2,000 watt hours, or 2kWh = 25 Cents per Year.

As for your iPad, keeping it fed costs just $1.36 a year, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.

Your average laptop, with its far bigger screen, uses about 72 kWh, costing some $8 a year.

There is your challenge:

Make a power station that has a ROI such to recover the cost using the 25 cents per Year returns.

Answer: if it cost you $20 to make the power station- it will take about 40 Years before you see benefit.

You should get someone to open up your iPhone, disconnect the battery, and reconnect it. That's where I would start with it, it may be something more serious, but there's a pretty good chance just that the disconnection and reconnection of the battery on the logic board could work. You could try to do it yourself, but it requires taking off the touchscreen (digitizer) assembly, about a dozen small screws, and a few other parts like EMI shields. It's not too difficult, but if you decide to do it, you'll need to buy tools online and repair guides at iFixit.