Apple’s conventional fall rollout of main software program updates has hit its first bump within the street for 2024, with the information that iPadOS 18 has needed to be pulled after experiences that it was bricking customers’ iPad Execs.
iPadOS 18 was introduced again in June at WWDC, and at last grew to become accessible to the general public in its completed type on Monday, September 16. However regardless of the months of beta testing that preceded the launch, an issue shortly grew to become obvious: some house owners of the M4 iPad Professional (which got here out earlier this yr) discovered that putting in the brand new software program bricked their gadget–which is to say, rendered it utterly non-functional.
One such person began a thread on Reddit to focus on the problem.
“I’ve the M4 13[-inch] Professional,” they wrote. “In some unspecified time in the future in the course of the [iPadOS 18] replace my iPad turned off, and would now not activate… I attempted the entire reset choices however nothing labored. I simply took it to the Apple Retailer who confirmed it’s utterly bricked.”
The person indicated that the unit is unfixable and that they are going to want a substitute.
Confirming that this wasn’t a one-off, commenters started chiming in with their very own experiences. A good chunk of respondents indicated that their replace had proceeded positive (even with the very same mannequin), however dozens had encountered the identical drawback: I finished counting at 36 fellow brickees.
Apple has now confirmed that the issue exists and that it has taken down iPadOS 18 till it may possibly discover a resolution. The corporate issued an announcement to MacRumors: “We now have quickly eliminated the iPadOS 18 replace for M4 iPad Professional fashions as we work to resolve a difficulty that’s impacting a small variety of gadgets.”
The final consensus is that, as Apple claims in its assertion, this drawback impacts solely the newest technology of iPad Professional, the fashions with an M4 processor (and never all of them, both). Quite a few Redditors reported that commonplace iPads, iPad minis, or iPad Airs had not been unaffected.
I noticed only one iPad Air proprietor complaining of bricking on the Reddit thread, however they conclude by noting that “the restore facility… now says it was bent and won’t restore with out $650.” In order that’s presumably unrelated.
Right here at Macworld we usually advise readers to attend till a number of days after the launch of a significant software program replace earlier than putting in it, in case one thing like this crops up. Anybody who has skilled the issue ought to take their affected gadget to an Apple Retailer or an official third-party restore retailer and search help there.