Locked out! Fixing my mum’s iPad

My mum exclusively uses an Apple iPad for her online life. She has a smartphone but it’s an old Android one that is useful for not much more than phone calls and texts. Her weekly shopping, Facebook and everything else is on her iPad.

A few months back, it came to an end. The supermarket app no longer worked on her iPad Air due to its age and she was in a constant battle with the – wait for it – 16GB of storage. It was time to upgrade, which she did. She didn’t get the latest all-singing model, but found a new but previous generation iPad instead. When she got it, it guided her through copying over from her old device. She put her old iPad away and continued, happily, with the new one.

But, as much as we think about security these days, it’s not always the best thing for someone elderly. She didn’t have a passcode on it and, when searching for “Password” (for the passwords app) one day it came up with the passcode screen instead. She got confused and supplied one. She didn’t write it down (she does for her important passwords for everything else) and, after a couple of days, forgot it.

She tried recalling it but ended up locking herself out.

I gave her the number for Apple Support to see if they could help, but they couldn’t/wouldn’t (not sure which one it is). If you set a passcode and forget it, that’s your issue.

I sent my sister an Apple Support document and, with laptop in hand, she followed the instructions to get into the iPad by using iTunes and resetting it via a USB cable. This literally just wipes it and starts again. However, my mum then struggled because she just signed into it this time and nothing was installed or set up how she wanted.

So, it was time for me to visit.

The first thing I found was that, on her old or new iPad, she didn’t have iCloud turned on and had no backups. I quickly changed that. I found too that, on the new iPad, her passwords app was locked out – it said they were encrypted and I needed the passcode to unlock. Yelp. Yeah, that passcode we didn’t know. Yet, all her passwords were sat on her old iPad with no issues.

I reset her new iPad again, but this time got it to transfer from the old one. Passwords, unencrypted this time, came over as did all her existing settings and apps. All was now right with the world. Until next time anyway.

Something I hadn’t appreciated was just how incessant the OS is with nagging you about adding a passcode. They don’t seem to appreciate that forcing this for someone with regular memory issues is not the greatest idea, whatever the security implication here. There is no “stop asking about this” option.

One way would be to allow someone else to have the option to override in situations like this – something they don’t, of course, so the issue remains real. As Apple device users get older, maybe this kind of thing is going to become more an issue and we’ll see improvements. I hope so.