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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

I’ve seen this story circulating and the explanation is totally wrong. It won’t let you attempt that many times. The clock got set to the unix epoch somehow, and it’s waiting until sometime close to the present to allow unlocking. The math adds up. This happened to an old phone I had that sat around with a dead battery for a long time, and I found forums where plenty of other people have had the problem.

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They briefly cover that in the article:

> ... this was a problem especially with early iPads (ours is ancient)—they can have trouble with time and date, which in turn can send the lockout time soaring.

The author agrees with you. It was attributed to a bug in the way some early iPads / iOS kept time.

> I was impressed by how many people posted substantive help, explaining that this was a problem especially with early iPads (ours is ancient)—they can have trouble with time and date, which in turn can send the lockout time soaring.

I just ran into this with a seldom used MacBook Pro 2016/2017. I couldn't reset the password via iCloud and eventually I realized the system clock was wrong (on the order of years). I had to boot into the OS X recovery mode and start a terminal and set the date and time by the command line. Of course, none of the login screens have a time/date setting widget let alone show the system time and date so it took a bit of guessing.

Once the system time and date was correct, the iCloud password reset feature worked without issue.

Ah, then, won't syncing it up to a computer reset the clock, and the lockout lessen?

Can you sync if it's locked?

Yes, the article says that was the solution on how to unlock it.

They didn’t sync the iPad, they reset it through DFU.

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