For the past few days the clock on my iPad has been 25 minutes slow. I tried setting the time manually and then going back to automatic time but it always jumped back 25 minutes. Now I could have just left it on manual but I like things to work properly.
This was more than a minor inconvenience as my reminders were all happening at the wrong time. I also use logmein and it was refusing to connect to hosts producing a time mismatch error.
The usual Google showed lots of posts from people having similar problems and suggesting a number of fixes.
I tried:
- Turning location service off and on
- Hard reset
- Changing regional settings to something random and changing back
- Setting the time manually several hours out and then turning automatic time back on
All of the above resulted in an iPad that was still consistently stuck 25 minutes in the past.
Some of my forum reading suggested a hardware problem may be the cause so I looked out the receipt to discover that he iPad was delivered on April 13 2011 so it just out of warranty by a few days.
I decided to contact Apple support on the reasonable basis that a few days shouldn’t matter between friends. On the support site I selected the Express Lane contact option and, after entering my Apple ID and iPad serial number, I was told that it did not qualify for support. Undeterred I selected the option worded along the lines of I believe my issue is known and covered.
A helpful Apple guy called me back almost instantly and took me through most of the steps I have listed above. He then went through a system reset which still didn’t fix the issue of the sticky clock. Finally he suggested I try a full restore before he could go any further.
I use iCloud backup and recently paid for additional storage to make sure I could back up everything needed. As I type my iPad has completed restore and it slowly restoring from iCloud. I have never performed an iCloud restore before and expect to have lots of post-restore cleaning up and reconfiguration to do before I am fully up and running.
To finish on a positive note I can see that the clock is now at the right time.
