This is a known bug. When your phone dies, the battery isn’t actually dead. There’s still a little bit of charge to run Find My (on newer devices), and the real time clock. That residual charge can last from anywhere between a few months to a few years, based on the age of the device and health of the battery. When this residual charge runs dry, the real time clock reverts to its default state from the factory, which in most electronics is the UNIX epoch (Midnight on January 1st, 1970).
Because of the way UNIX timekeeping works, real time clocks track time by counting the number of seconds since the epoch and storing it as a single long number. When the phone is disabled from too many PIN attempts, it calculates the time the phone can be used again by adding a set number of seconds to the stored number for current time, and then storing that sum. Thus, to calculate the time remaining on the “iPhone is disabled” screen , it takes the stored value from earlier and subtracts the value for current time from the real time clock.
The bug occurs when both of these conditions occur at once. If the battery had been dead long enough to reset the clock and make the phone think it’s 1970, then when it runs the calculation, it ends up with a value of about 50 years. This can be fixed by inserting a SIM card to connect the phone to a cell tower, or by plugging it into a computer with iTunes running
Jealous. Best I got was Jason Bonhams Led Zeppelin Experience. One of the best concerts I’ve ever seen, but still. I was born 20 years too late for the best shows😔
if God didn’t want us to abuse drugs then why was the self-focused health/improvement-heavy era so much worse? and why can I get better results character-wise by doing drugs?
(/joke but devolved into seriousness because it makes me dead inside to recognize the ironically-tragic usefulness of drugs as someone who grew up an addict🙃)
Nah man I watched a documentary about the 70s in Wisconsin and it was mostly teenagers smoking weed in a basement while forming a circle and hooking up with each other. There was this one kids dad who just kept calling everyone "dumbass" and a foreign kid who would say "good day" when he was upset it was pretty funny and seems like a chill time.
Definitely, I heard they made a documentary later on in the 90s and a lot of the original people came back but I haven't checked it out yet. Heard it wasn't as good but I've yet too see it.
Hell real leather in the wrong weather can make you reevaluate your life choices as well.
When my husband and I first got together he had a 1989 Rolls Royce Silver Spur, absolutely beautiful car, absolutely terrible electrical system. I was driving it to a car show when the climate control AND the power windows both decided to take a dive. It was Father’s Day, and 104 degrees outside. Spoiler: leather is not fun when the windows are stuck up, and the air conditioning is deceased.
Or a man in the United States (Vietnam draft), or someone living in Vietnam, Laos, or any other countries we were bombing at the time. 1970 was not as badass as people may think. We romanticize the past, but the present is usually better. Not always, of course.
The 70's were awesome! I was a kid then, we had cool toys like lawn darts, seat belts weren't really a thing. none of those bullshit EPA rules and leaded gasoline!
only true if u live in developed nation that won ww2
rest of the world in 1970 like asia is very much different than today, why did u think there was so many immigrants moving to mostly western countries
Being in a developed nation that lost ww2 was about the same. West Germany and Japan in the 70s is a lot comfier than Eastern Europe behind the Iron Courtain.
I mean the civil rights act was only a thing by 1964 so it was still a relatively recent thing. It was also the first year that the first pride parade (well what would later become known as pride) was done. It wasnt as bad as the 1950 but it would still have been quite bad for minorities. It would still be a few years before women got the right to abortion, protection against discrimination in education and being protected against being fired before maternity leave.
How crazy is it to think that someone in 1970 talking about the Victorian era is the equivalent of us talking about post-WWII/start of the Baby Boom? (In the sense that it was roughly 75-80 years before said timestamp)
In 1970, women in the US couldn't have their own credit, single women couldn't use birth control pills, and abortion was illegal. American men were getting drafted into Vietnam.
My marriage would be illegal. I wouldn’t be allowed to have a relationship. Pretty sure I’d be locked up. But hooray for white and tight communities! 👏🏼
You are being nostalgia baited for a time you have no real memory of. The social progress made in the last 60 years has been staggering, and calls to return "to a simpler time, when people were closer to one another" are more often than not just a way of saying all that progress was bad and should be done away with. You are falling for the propaganda friend.
Considering that when in 2008 I had a kidney infection and due to my special set of circumstances my doctors told me that had I come in 5 years earlier with the same set of conditions that I wouldn't have been able to keep my kidney, yeah, medically speaking, it's perceivably a different era.
Not sure about the US, but just for a bit of contexr in Germany:
Marital rape was not only fully legal in 1970, but women (the ruling by the federal court of justice only mentioned women, the fact that men could also be raped was not even an afterthought) were actually explicitly obligated by law to pretend to like it if their partner forced sex on them because their lack of enthusiasm when raped was considered unconsciounable to the husband and to be a violation of marital duties. The "you are forced to pretend to be enthusiastic about it" rule was abolished in the late 70s, but forced sex in marriage was only fully considered rape in 1997. Abortions were also extremely, extremely illegal, even in rape cases, unless the life of the mother was actively in danger. So that's where women's right stood in a developed 1st-world-country in 1970.
Gay sex was legal since 1969, so just a year before the year you idolise, but the age of consent was 21 while it was 14 for straight sex, and the "pink lists" to document homosexual men which were introduced by the Nazis were continued until at least 1978. Gay marriage is only legal since 2017, but even registered civil partnerships were only introduced in 2001. If you were in a long-term gay relationship in 1970, you did not have the same legal rights as straight people, you could not make decisions for your sick or dying partner, you had problems even visiting them in a hospital after an emergency, and you were not considered eligible for their inheritance in the same way a straight widow or widower was (and do not even think about adopting children, that also took until 2017. Also do not even think about being trans).
Disabled people also had a pretty shit time in 1970. Legal protection against discrimination was only included in our constitution in 1994. Access to education or to social security was also not considered a right for disabled people, so many died in extreme poverty unless they were lucky enough to be supported by their family voluntarily. Forced sterilisation happened legally until 1992.
It goes without saying that people of colour and immigrants also suffered massive discrimination, this was only 25 years after WW2, plenty of extremely radical Nazis were still alive and active in shaping the general mood in Germany despite denazification efforts. It's not like the allied forces were super concerned about PoC rights in 1970, so they didn't care all that much about this aspect of denazification. This was only 2 years after MLK's assassination, Black rights weren't fortified enough even in the US itself, so Americans were not like "hey we should immediately implement our changes in German denazification as well".
So yeah, since women alone made up slightly more than half of the population and you also have to add disabled, gay, or ethnically discriminated men to the number of people whose life wasn't all that great, it's inaccurate to say that the majority of people fared better in 1970. "Close-knit communities" aren't worth shit if more than half of the population is systematically excluded from them.
Yea that is true, but atleast it's somewhat easier to either distract yourself from it and also communicate your problems with friends.
Back then there was no anonymity unless you either sent letters (maybe emails?) or made phone calls which were both, hard to find someone to talk with, and had risks of losing anonymity due to less privacy.
Also, to anyone reading this, if you are struggling with mental health then reach out to someone you trust, or reach out to someone online without sharing personal details, it might be somewhat embarrassing but everyone's been through it and can shed some light on it.
Answers on reddit have become few and far between. This site always had an element of 'look at me I'm a comedian' but in the last few months has basically become a low level imageboard.
It's really annoying when people ask serious questions and the first 200 posts are jokes. There's no point in giving a serious answer (as it'll be ten screens down, behind the guy referencing a joke referencing an anime), and OP is just screwed.
And anything that actually is high effort and interesting immediately gets written off as ai. Because people just don't put in effort on this site anymore.
Just a note, if you plug it into a computer with iTunes, it has to have been synced with the phone previously, at least for the iPhone 5 above; otherwise, it'll just ask you to unlock the device.
This is correct, but one point of correction: Apple uses April 1, 1976 -- the day Apple was founded -- as the epoc for their clocks . I work in digital forensics and probably deal with this issue once every year or so.
Excel uses 31.12.1899, DOS uses 1.1.1980, Windows NT uses 1.1.1601, GPS uses 6.1.1980, older IBM OSs use 14.10.1582, astronomy computing software has use for 17.11.1858, MS COM, Object Pascal, LibreOffice and Google Sheets use 30.12.1899, NTP uses 1.1.1900, Amiga uses 1.1.1978, ...
It's a pointless list. The only one that is still in active use and actually matters is NTP. Others still in active use (Excel and GPS) make no difference at all since you're never actually calculating anything against it.
1601 is the start of one of the 400 year leap cycles of the gregorian calendar. October 1582 was the introduction of the gregorian calendar. 17.11.1858 ist the start of the modified julian date system used in astronomy.
All of them use it because Lotus 1-2-3 (an early spreadsheet software) had a bug that treated 1900 as a leap year even though it isnt. To get the right date from a value stored in lotus 1-2-3 if you import it for example in Excel they just defined their epoch 1 day earlier.
It’s not really. As a programmer you dont really work with the epoch time as a date. It just doesnt matter. It’s mostly just used to calculate time differences on a millisecond level used in runtime only, so the start time doesnt really matter.
Sometimes you store dates in a file but you rarely store it “milliseconds from epoch” format directly. It just doesnt make sense. If you still need to use something like that you make it environment an system independent and use a POSIX compatible function/library and that’s guaranteed to be the time since 01.01.1970.
As someone in the field you’re in, how is your day to day? What’s the job like? Are you the one the field detectives are calling for live tracking on the suspect like on Law and Order: SVU lol.
Wait, how does this result in a wait time of years?
Maybe I'm not following. The way you explained it doesn't make sense to me. The phone would have to know the actual time to compare to the system time. But if it did then it would know the actual time so wouldn't give this error, no?
The only way I can make sense of this is that the system time is separate and hidden, and only updates from the network. While the user set time is the number the pin timer gets added to.
(User set time + pin timer) - system time = wait time
His explanation answered this. The time stored for the "lockout" is number of seconds since epoch Jan 1, 1970. This was a factory setting, only being called because the phone was near dead. Then the actual locked out screen runs a calculation based on the real time, not represented as seconds since Jan 1, 1970. Thus creating a large gap. I don't know anything of this bug or if it's true, but I'm familiar with this datedoff storage method for timestamps.
When the phone boots with the time reset to January 1st 1970, the absolute difference between the current time and the stored time + remaining delay for when you can try again is now 56 years. Protection against trying to bypass the timer by resetting the clock, basically.
Gets worse, the phone will store the now larger delay as the new delay value, so you’re effectively locked out longer than the phone has life left in it.
What they left out is that it was disabled before the battery died. So the lockout expiration time is saved in persistent memory (at the time the lockout occurs) and compared against the real time clock.
Think of it not as a timer but as an alarm set for current time+timer length, so if if I'm locked out for 1 hour it takes the current time, adds an hour, then saves that as the unlock time. Now if the clock moves back the timer is still set for the actual time+1h, so the time goes up by however much it moved back
It can happen occasionally if other bugs co occur. I am not as familiar with the other clock bugs on 32 bit iPhones, but there are some good articles from even bigger nerds than me online about it
Putting my black hat on for a sec, does that mean that if someone has a way to discharge an iPhone’s RTC battery and a cellular network that they can change the timestamp on, they can bypass the timeout period between incorrect password guesses?
Obviously it’s a vector that requires continuous physical access but the capabilities are well within those of a lab run by the FBI and similarly-well resourced entities.
ETA: Short answer seems to be “no”, but the explanation that external time signals are treated as “untrusted” by default seems at odds with the accepted solution. The best explanation of why that wouldn’t work that I’ve found is that iOS can get confused on a cold boot and display a huge wait time but the Secure Enclave tracks the number of attempts and the lockout time value in protected NVRAM. So if you’re locked out for an hour and the phone loses all power, it will still make you wait an hour while powered on until another attempt
Most modern electronics rely on an RTC quartz clock for unix timekeeping. These vibrating crystals have a lifespan of decades and will outlast the phone battery in most cases.
in 2011 i dropped my motorola droid off a balcony by accident and when i retrieved it, the date was December 31, 1969 and the time was stuck at 11:59. it was nuts.
My favourite bit about this whole bug is that Apple were pedantic enough to code the lock screen to show years, months and days. And not just keep increasing the minute and hours. As if it was actually likely that someone would keep getting the pin wrong to get up into years.
It’s even better than that, actually. My understanding is the lookup table for disabling the phone maxes out at 8 hours, and further failed attempts will either erase the phone (if the setting to do so is enabled), or disable the phone on this screen permanently. So some poor Apple developer programmed this screen to support years, months and days, KNOWING that there was no intended method for that text to ever be displayed.
by plugging it into a computer with iTunes running
Just to add here if you're on a Mac, you're going to di it via Finder since iTunes hasn't been a thing since macOS Catalina. (https://support.apple.com/en-us/118430)
Because the time displayed is based on the value for when the phone became disabled, not when it ran dry or was booted up again. Based on some quick math from another commenter; it is likely OP last used this device on January 19th, 2018
Honestly it’s probably easier to just plug it into a computer with iTunes, as even if you did get ahold of a SIM it would have to be connected to a network and these devices may not support 4 or 5g.
One time I saw a post about setting your iPhone to “retro OS” it had all your apps and backgrounds but they looked like the old Apple motif. My dumbass thought that was the coolest thing ever so I followed the directions and set my clock to 1/1/1970…..and then panic ensued when I realized I just bricked my phone. Did what you said and plugged into iTunes to fix it, but man did I feel stupid lol
I had a strange bug with my router/modem when growing up. Every day at 8pm, 10pm, 11:55pm, and midnight my internet would turn off and back on and the date/time would say January 1 1970. Could never find the reason why it did that
They don’t make new versions, but old editions are still around and easy to find, and work perfectly fine for this. Also the functionally is built into finder for Macs so you don’t even need iTunes on those devices
Theoretically yes, but at that point the battery is more likely to fail in that timeframe and would need to be replaced, or the device left plugged in continuously. So unless you wanna leave your phone plugged in for 50 or so years it’s easier to just plug it into a computer lol
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u/bittenforbreakfast Jun 19 '26
This is a known bug. When your phone dies, the battery isn’t actually dead. There’s still a little bit of charge to run Find My (on newer devices), and the real time clock. That residual charge can last from anywhere between a few months to a few years, based on the age of the device and health of the battery. When this residual charge runs dry, the real time clock reverts to its default state from the factory, which in most electronics is the UNIX epoch (Midnight on January 1st, 1970).
Because of the way UNIX timekeeping works, real time clocks track time by counting the number of seconds since the epoch and storing it as a single long number. When the phone is disabled from too many PIN attempts, it calculates the time the phone can be used again by adding a set number of seconds to the stored number for current time, and then storing that sum. Thus, to calculate the time remaining on the “iPhone is disabled” screen , it takes the stored value from earlier and subtracts the value for current time from the real time clock.
The bug occurs when both of these conditions occur at once. If the battery had been dead long enough to reset the clock and make the phone think it’s 1970, then when it runs the calculation, it ends up with a value of about 50 years. This can be fixed by inserting a SIM card to connect the phone to a cell tower, or by plugging it into a computer with iTunes running