A new iPhone bug has popped up that will make the device unusable. “I changed the time to January 1st 1970”, NBC News quotes one poor iPhone user’s complaint to Apple.
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A bug causes devices on iOS 8 or 9 to go haywire once the date manually changed. According to the Guardian, this bug affects all iPhone, iPad and iPods with the A7 processor or higher, or all smartphones created from the model 5S, tablets from the Air and iPad Mini Retina and the iPod from the sixth generation. It is related to a Unix glitch as the date 1/1/1970 has an internal value of zero on a Unix system which leads to a software freakout. Obviously this isn’t something you should try out just for kicks but, if you’re curious, YouTube user Zach Straley has a pretty good demonstration of what sending your iPhone back 46 years will do.
Please duplicate bug report (rdar://24606140) at http://bugreport.apple.com or send feedback through http://www.apple.com/feedback so that this issue gets resolved.
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Even if you’re in a time zone where resetting the date to January 1, 1970 doesn’t brick your phone, it’s still not worth trying since there isn’t a secret cool Easter egg waiting for you no matter what. A hacker could easily manipulate these settings by sending fake NTP requests over a public WiFi connected and leave every iPhone useless. The creators of Unix set midnight UTC, January 1, 1970 as the “Unix Epoch”. CNN Money offered a hypothesis.
