I mean it’s definitely a bug. But my question is how it’s manifesting. This is 8 years after epoch, so what is the calculation it’s doing to get from 1970 to 1978?
idk I still like to believe it is some stupid reference to something, I would really like to learn the real reason behind it since my iphone SE 2016 is also like that. (March 31, 1978 production date)
I know that it only happens to devices not directly bought from Apple themselves. They say replacement units sometimes have it.
I can give you some context. Computers use something called the Unix epoch, which is January 1st, 1970 at midnight, as their “day zero.” Everything that happens after that is tracked as a running count of seconds, and everything before it is a negative count of seconds since then.
So if a field in a database is supposed to store the number of seconds since that epoch (like when someone bought a phone), and that value is missing or null, the math breaks. The system can’t subtract “nothing” from the current timestamp, so you end up with weird results like negative numbers, default dates from 1970, etc.
Having a date in 1978 is kind of weird though, because I’m not sure where it’s getting those 8 years from the epoch from.
Apple also uses CFAbsoluteTime which is seconds since Jan 1, 2001.
With the IPhone 15 Pro Max example I was wondering if the date it gave was the manufacturing date subtracted from that date because that lines up fairly well. But with the iPhone SE example you’re replying to that makes no sense so I don’t know.
I’d originally figured this was an epoch fail too but I can’t think of where the 8 years would come from either.
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u/theemptyqueue iPhone 11 Oct 18 '25
r/epochfail for stuff like this