Comment by kkylin
11 hours ago
I had an even older iPad I was happily using for similar use cases. Until one day a family member bricked it and I needed to factory reset. No big deal, I thought -- nothing important on it. Turns out it needed to phone home to do the factory reset, and since the server it wanted to talk to was no longer up (or perhaps the address changed?) I couldn't factory reset the iPad.
If someone has a work-around I'd love to hear it. Until then, or until Apple changes this design, I think I'm done with iPads. I don't want to pay that much to "own" something that Apple can simply make obsolete by reconfiguring or turning off a server somewhere.
Edit: fix typo
You should be able to DFU, but when it phones home it'll require a software upgrade
Apple recently had an issue with expired certs they had to remedy. That tends to be their bottleneck now.
Yeah that just tripped me up trying to recomission a 2012 Macbook Pro.
Couldn't connect to wifi except through a password-less hotspot. Then I couldnt get online because nothing with SSL was working.
I didnt have a pen drive so I had to FTP off another machine, via my phone hotspot. We got there though!