Just bought an iPhone 5 in second hand and it seems that i need to have the Apple ID from the first owner to use it… Any advice?

I am curious about this. Is the activation lock something special which needs to be set? I recently got an old iPhone 4 from a friend and he had forgotten his 4 digit passcode to the phone. But I was able to reset it to factory conditions anyway, and activate the phone.

Are you all talking about something different?

doug

With iOS 7, Find My iPhone includes a new feature called Activation Lock, which makes it more difficult for anyone else to use or sell your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch if you ever lose it. It starts working the moment you turn on Find My iPhone in iOS 7. With Activation Lock, your Apple ID and password will be required before anyone can

From here > http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5818

If you stole my phone and took it to Apple to get it working again. Apple would send me an email and let me know who you are and ask me if why i have your phone and if you want to remove it form your Apple account. If you dont respond within a certain amount of time then Apple will remove the phone from your account.

This is false.

Not really! That phone you got from your friend did not have Find My iPhone turned on. if he had Find My IPhone turned on then when you reset it to the factory condition then the phone would not activate until your friend activated it with his Apple account password.

But what if your friend was in the hospital or he was out of town in a foreign country or somewhere you cannot reach him? Then you cant activate the iPhone he gave you and everyone here will assume that you are a thief and Apple will not help you. If that friend is passed away then the iPhone he gave you would be useless and a waste. With my solution that would not happen.

I think you dont understand the discussion here.

I fully understand.

No you dont cause you said what i said is false. I was talking about a hypothetical situation where i had a solution to the problem.

Not the way you wrote it, it was stated as a fact.

You were not following the discussion correctly and reading my previous posts.

Hi Doug,

Activation Lock is a function of iOS 7, so your friend probably had an earlier iOS on the device, and did not have iCloud enabled or Find My iPhone turned on. I'm guessing that once you reset the device it updated to iOS 7, so, if you have an iCloud account, then you probably have Find My iPhone turned on, and you now have the Activation Lock enabled on your device. Here is an article that explains it more fully:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5818

Cheers,

GB

gail from maine wrote:

Hi Doug,

Activation Lock is a function of iOS 7, so your friend probably had an earlier iOS on the device, and did not have iCloud enabled or Find My iPhone turned on. I'm guessing that once you reset the device it updated to iOS 7, so, if you have an iCloud account, then you probably have Find My iPhone turned on, and you now have the Activation Lock enabled on your device. Here is an article that explains it more fully:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5818

Cheers,

GB

I see. Yes, you are probably right. His iPhone 5 is up-to-date, but his older iPhone 4 was probably not. The new security is reassuring. And people need to be cautious when purchasing a used iPhone.

doug

Doug Lerner2 wrote:

And people need to be cautious when purchasing a used iPhone.

I'm considering having that statement made into a bumper sticker. The number of people posting here who bought 2nd hand iPhones without checking is huge.

We also have the same scenario I bought iPhone 5 from Sulit. The unit contents complete but then when I able to activate the iPhone and sadly phone was aking the apple ID of the 1st owner 😟 Hope apple can fix this.

rosseanturla wrote:

We also have the same scenario I bought iPhone 5 from Sulit. The unit contents complete but then when I able to activate the iPhone and sadly phone was aking the apple ID of the 1st owner 😟 Hope apple can fix this.

Apple is not going to fix it. It's supposed to work this way.