Anyone changing their iPhone’s date hoping for a delightful rainbow-colored Apple logo easter egg will soon discover their phone refuses to boot up.
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iPhone users probably aren’t aware, but by setting it to a specific date, you can actually kill your device.
Why would someone ever set their clock back to this date? Unix time has been counting every second since then. Most of those who have reported the issue are in the U.S., which is behind GMT – the time zone in which the iPhone stores the date – so changing the date to January 1 1970 places the phone’s internal clock at a number below zero, causing the crash.
What’s so special about 1 January 1970?
However, CNN Money speculates it has to do with Unix time.
Well here we go again, another way to brick iPhones and an interesting way at that, considering nearly no one is going to change the date to January 1, 1970. The bug affects iPhones, iPads and iPod touches with 64-bit processors running iOS 8 or iOS 9, including the iPhone 5S or newer, the iPad Air, iPad mini 2 or the 2015 sixth generation iPod touch or newer.
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We don’t know why you would deliberately brick your iPhone, and we strongly suggest you don’t, but if you do want to, this is how. In other time zones, setting the clock will result in a positive time value.
