Imagine you come home from work one day, reach for your iPad for some Netflix time, and start typing your password on autopilot without really paying attention to anything. But, wait! What’s that message on your screen? Your iPad has been disabled for 25,536,442 minutes…um, what? But hey, it’s not like that’s going to happen to someone in real life, except that it did! A certain Mr Evan Osnos of The New Yorker came home to exactly this message displayed on his iPad screen, and here’s what unfolded.
How the Hell?
That’s a great question you’ve got there, and it’s one with a very simple answer. His three-year-old went on an unlocking spree on the iPad and got it wrong so many times that he locked his dad’s iPad for 25,536,442 minutes, which is approximately 48 years. They really do tell you to think your decision of having kids through, but who imagines this shit happening?!
Twitter to the Rescue
Anyhoo, the stumped Evan tweeted about his predicament, asking fellow twitter-wasis for advice. And, as most things seem to go on Twitter, this too was far from fruitful. He got a bunch of responses telling him to put the iPad in rice, teleport to the future to unlock the iPad, reboot the um toddler, and a couple of other gems. But there were some helpful suggestions as well, such as “Just connect it to the computer you originally synced it to iTunes on, let it sync, and it’ll be fine.” Quite a handy little tip really, even for those of us whose Apple device has been disabled for a less drastic amount of time.
Apple’s Advice
In such situations, Apple recommends restoring the device, which while effective, means that you lose all your data that hasn’t been backed up. And while I’m sure that Apple didn’t have quite this situation in mind while shelling out this advice, if the shoe fits, why not?
He told to the New York Daily News, “It’s down a few hundred minutes from yesterday, but it looks like we’ve still got 25 million minutes to go. The consensus seems to be that we’re using an old operating system that won’t let us restart fresh from iTunes.”
So, do you think that he’ll be able to figure out a way back into his iPad? I, for one, know that there’s going to be a night years from now, when questions like ‘Is the iPad still locked’ ‘Did the kid ever live the incident down’ will rob me of my sleep and peace of mind!
