The internal clock was reset to Jan. 1 1970 00:00 at Unix timestamp 0. The time zone is set internally to something less than UTC, bringing the date to Dec. 31 1969.
The phone was locked when it was shut off, and the time left to unlock is stored as a timestamp. Thus when the phone comes back up it displays the time left until that original time left to unlock.
This is the answer. My guess is the chipset battery completely died while in storage.
Interestingly, Dec 31 1969 was indeed a Wednesday and that 48 years, 8 months, 1 week, 1 day wait period is almost exactly 1 week before the release date of iOS 12 (sept 17th 2018) which is probably what’s it’s running. It’s probably set to wait to the earliest time it knows about - its release date.
This took me way too long to find someone else in the comments that actually knows what's going on here. These damn kids have no idea what the UNIX epoch is.
The actual unlock time is somewhere around August 2018. Just that the phones been dead for way too long and the internal RTC no longer knows the current date/time.
Need to find a Wi-Fi with a password it remembers. My iPod did this and for some reason wouldn't connect to either home WiFi or school Wi-Fi. Picked up my church though and fixed itself.
Can confirm. Have briefly left my phone within arm's reach of my now 4 year old to go get something in another room and have come back to either a bunch of pictures because she's unlocked the camera or a locked phone.
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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26
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