[mckn1ght]

No need to apologize. I didn’t say they are equivalent, I’m trying to draw analogies. If you leave your car sitting for 5 years, you will probably have a bit of a hard time starting it too. If you leave a garden or house untouched for 5 years, it’s not going to be pretty.

They didn’t give us much to go on about their situation. I’ve not heard of an iPad not being able to be turned on and unlocked with its passcode because of an iTunes account or server issue. If that is indeed what happened, I agree that is not cool. But I doubt that is what is going on. I’m curious to know more.

[ben-schaaf]

And yet I guarantee the Linux computer that's been sitting in my closet for 10+ years will boot up just fine. As would it's Windows partition. As would the old MacBook I don't have anymore. Those are a lot more analogous than cars or gardens.

[paulmd]

Ssds don’t hold data for 10 years so there’s a strong possibility that in fact it would not “boot up just fine”.

If there’s critical keys that have been lost etc it might indeed be unrecoverable, especially in this era of automatic bitlocker.

[ben-schaaf]

It has spinning rust. Additionally it's true that SSDs have trouble retaining data for long periods of time, but afaik this is separate to actual degradation. So if it had an SSD it might not boot off it, but the hardware is otherwise fully usable. Same situation if you lose an encryption key.