Apple sold me a *DEMO* iPad 2 unit

So I picked up an iPad 2 today. This one was meant as a gift for my father.


I surprised him with it tonight and he was ELATED.


While I was helping him to set it up, I noticed a bit of weirdness. We kept getting a sync message from Mobile Me asking to merge 188 contacts with the computer. I clicked "show details" and found a slew of apple.com contacts, as well as asian contacts written in what I believe are Chinese characters. While investigating this, the iPad switched over to screensaver mode, and displayed an iPad 2 promotional screensaver advertising all of its features. The photos app was full of Apple promotional photos, and on pages 2 and 3 the iPad had a bunch of apps/content loaded like Molecules, Tron, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, books, music, videos etc.

I just checked his box against mine and noticed his says Ipad Wi-Fi 16GB Black DEMO, and even has a different model number.


Since these things are in short supply, I'd hate to have to take it away from him and return it when new ones arrive. I wonder if he should keep it? If there are any internal differences between demo and retail units? Obviously the pro-loaded apps won't be in sync with his iTunes account and won't update. And I don't know if we can delete them (haven't tried). Then there's that iPad 2 promotional screensaver to deal with....


Has this happened to anyone else?

I may try the restore. Hopefully it runs the same firmware as a retail unit and won't freak out.


Aside from not wanting to take it away from my father for what could be 3 weeks or more, I feel that it should be on Apple to contact *me* when *they* get a new shipment. I shouldn't have to return it and check in on a daily basis to see when they're getting new stock. If was enough effort to get this one.

gdjsnyder said:

OP, if you take it back I am sure Apple would give you a new unit. As there are no refurb units yet, Apple keeps a certain stock of all iPads to give out a replacements. I am almost positive they would offer you one of those for your trouble.

Click to expand...

That would be cool, I hope so.

Otherwise, I'm going to keep it throughout the 14 day return window, and let them know that I think *they* should hold an iPad for *me* when they receive replacement stock. I'm not getting back into a queue.

Of course, if a restore works, and they assure me it's functionally identical to a retail iPad, then maybe he'll get to keep it and I won't have to go through any hassle.

vincenz said:

This is a first. Haven't heard of this happening before. Is it a wifi model? Wondering how it would be if it were 3G. There would be no ejector hole for the sim.

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It's a wi-fi model.

@ mystikal


There's no demo.app that's visible.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

Thanks for the info Chundles!

That's what I was looking for. So I will return it then. Hopefully they can swap it. If not, I'd like to let him play with it for as long as he can until they get replacement stock. And I feel they should contact ME when they do. It was really crazy trying to get one of these.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

Yikes! ^^

I had someone call Apple for me (while I deal with business) and I'm told they said not to restore the device as it would permanently damage it.

Still waiting to hear what the plan will be regarding returning it.