Beware, time travelers.
A hoax image circulating online has tricked numerous iPhone, iPad and iPod users to change the date on their devices to Jan. 1, 1970 — only to have their Apple products break.
The image — in the design of an Apple ad — tells users that if they change the date back in their settings, turn the devices off then turn back on, that they would “warp back in time” and experience a retro Macintosh theme on their phone.
But, instead of time travel, all they got was a bricked phone.
“There were no smartphones in 1970…so it’s destroying itself. Or do you want the people in the 70s to detect you as a time traveler?” one Reddit user posted, jokingly, on a thread about the hoax.
Reddit users tweaked with the settings change to report that their phones and Apple devices wouldn’t reboot and they had to bring them into an Apple store to get fixed or scrap them all together.
It’s unclear who was behind the “Blast from the Past” hoax.
This isn’t the first time pranksters have tricked Apple product users — in 2011, someone advertised an app claiming to allow users to taste and smell things. In 2013, a fake Apple ad purported that Apple’s iOS 7 operating system made phones waterproof; or another ad, called Wave, which led gullible users to believe devices could be charged by putting them in a microwave.
Reports say it’s difficult to turn the date back on Apple devices by accident, due to the tedious scrolling involved. But some Reddit users fear it could be possible to hack into a WiFi network and change the dates on all connected devices, breaking them.
