THE POST MANY OF YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR!!!
Ok, first off let me say, I have been following Apple related blogs for the past 2 days to figure out what the situation was on Carrier Locked iPad Airs.
There is an utter boat load of conjecture, assumptions, he said / she said, copy paste of website small text, etc. But NO actual real life information where somebody bought a Carier XYZ labeled iPad Air and actually tried to activate it with another carrier's sim card.
Don't get me wrong, I have seen people who have put in other sim cards and said "hurray, the carrier screen came up when I went to cellular activation screen" but everybody stopped there and assumed it would activate if they saw that screen pop up with the right carrier.
I even talked to 3 different people at the Apple store in Chicago and they all were adamant that it was impossible to activate an AT&T iPad on Verizon. Actually, I was kind of depressed with how little information they even had. They were reading the box trying to comprehend the fact that there was only one model of iPad this year (barring the colors and memory capacity). It was actually quite pathetic that even their self deemed "expert" didn't know that little detail.
So now to the point of this post.
You can buy an AT&T iPad Air and activate it on Verizon! It will not be automatic like it would if you bought a Verizon iPad Air and activated it. It takes a call in to Verizon and some minor trickery.
I bought an AT&T iPad 64gb Space Grey from the Chicago Apple store (only because they didn't have the Verizon in 64GB in the entire state of Illinois).
I brought it home and unboxed it. Without turning it on, I removed the AT&T sim card and set it aside. I happened to have a Verizon (unactivate or used) nano sim from when I bought my 5s (didn't need it because I just put the sim from my iPhone 5 into the 5s once I got it).
I popped the unactivated Verizon sim into the iPad Air and powered it up. Went through the normal setup steps and restored a backup to the iPad. I did notice that it was connecting to Verizon as the carrier even though the data was not activated. This was my first positive sign.
Finally when I finished restoring my backup I tried to log in to my Verizon account and just do the swap there. NO LUCK. I couldn't add the iPad or swap it for my old iPad 4. Their website simply didn't recognize the MEID, IMEI or anything.
Next I tried to activate it through the iPad activation screen in the iPad's cellular settings. It popped up the Verizon activation screen and spun for a second then said "Unable to Activate" please cal some number.
Ok, so next I called Verizon and went through the prompts to get to a person who could add it. The lady asked me for the MEID. I gave it to her and she said it wasn't coming up. She then asked for the IMEI and I gave it to her and she had the same problem. At this point I made the mistake of telling her that it was actually an AT&T iPad and then a 5 minute conversation ensued about how it wasn't possible to activate that on Verizon and that I was a complete idiot for trying....
Hung up, called back in and got a new lady to help me. This time we went through the same process and had the same rsults. No pay attention, this is where things differ.....
I asked the lady if she could just activate the iPad using the SIM number which shows up as the ICCID under the iPad menus. She said sure, lets give that a shot. 2 minutes later and one reboot, up and running with LTE speeds and everything working perfectly.
After all of that, I told the lady that it was actually an AT&T iPad she just activated and she was shocked. She had been told they couldn't activate anything other than Verizon iPad Airs. So basically it is just a training issue or a company line that they can't do it.
My iPad is on my shared account downloading away at 4G speeds. The only thing a little different is that in my device management screens on Verizons website it doesn't show the iPad picture. It just shows the iPad as the data phone number it is assigned to and a blank box. Probably because it doesn't know it is an iPad because the IMEI isn't registered with Verizon's systems.
If something changes and it stops working, I will post back in this thread but for right now you can mark it down that an AT&T labeled iPad Air CAN be activated on Verizon if you manually call it in and use the ICCID for activation without telling them it isn't a Verizon iPad.
Sorry for the hella long post but I know a lot of you guys were waiting for this information and now you have it.
I gotta go eat my cold dinner now!
Ok, first off let me say, I have been following Apple related blogs for the past 2 days to figure out what the situation was on Carrier Locked iPad Airs.
There is an utter boat load of conjecture, assumptions, he said / she said, copy paste of website small text, etc. But NO actual real life information where somebody bought a Carier XYZ labeled iPad Air and actually tried to activate it with another carrier's sim card.
Don't get me wrong, I have seen people who have put in other sim cards and said "hurray, the carrier screen came up when I went to cellular activation screen" but everybody stopped there and assumed it would activate if they saw that screen pop up with the right carrier.
I even talked to 3 different people at the Apple store in Chicago and they all were adamant that it was impossible to activate an AT&T iPad on Verizon. Actually, I was kind of depressed with how little information they even had. They were reading the box trying to comprehend the fact that there was only one model of iPad this year (barring the colors and memory capacity). It was actually quite pathetic that even their self deemed "expert" didn't know that little detail.
So now to the point of this post.
You can buy an AT&T iPad Air and activate it on Verizon! It will not be automatic like it would if you bought a Verizon iPad Air and activated it. It takes a call in to Verizon and some minor trickery.
I bought an AT&T iPad 64gb Space Grey from the Chicago Apple store (only because they didn't have the Verizon in 64GB in the entire state of Illinois).
I brought it home and unboxed it. Without turning it on, I removed the AT&T sim card and set it aside. I happened to have a Verizon (unactivate or used) nano sim from when I bought my 5s (didn't need it because I just put the sim from my iPhone 5 into the 5s once I got it).
I popped the unactivated Verizon sim into the iPad Air and powered it up. Went through the normal setup steps and restored a backup to the iPad. I did notice that it was connecting to Verizon as the carrier even though the data was not activated. This was my first positive sign.
Finally when I finished restoring my backup I tried to log in to my Verizon account and just do the swap there. NO LUCK. I couldn't add the iPad or swap it for my old iPad 4. Their website simply didn't recognize the MEID, IMEI or anything.
Next I tried to activate it through the iPad activation screen in the iPad's cellular settings. It popped up the Verizon activation screen and spun for a second then said "Unable to Activate" please cal some number.
Ok, so next I called Verizon and went through the prompts to get to a person who could add it. The lady asked me for the MEID. I gave it to her and she said it wasn't coming up. She then asked for the IMEI and I gave it to her and she had the same problem. At this point I made the mistake of telling her that it was actually an AT&T iPad and then a 5 minute conversation ensued about how it wasn't possible to activate that on Verizon and that I was a complete idiot for trying....
Hung up, called back in and got a new lady to help me. This time we went through the same process and had the same rsults. No pay attention, this is where things differ.....
I asked the lady if she could just activate the iPad using the SIM number which shows up as the ICCID under the iPad menus. She said sure, lets give that a shot. 2 minutes later and one reboot, up and running with LTE speeds and everything working perfectly.
After all of that, I told the lady that it was actually an AT&T iPad she just activated and she was shocked. She had been told they couldn't activate anything other than Verizon iPad Airs. So basically it is just a training issue or a company line that they can't do it.
My iPad is on my shared account downloading away at 4G speeds. The only thing a little different is that in my device management screens on Verizons website it doesn't show the iPad picture. It just shows the iPad as the data phone number it is assigned to and a blank box. Probably because it doesn't know it is an iPad because the IMEI isn't registered with Verizon's systems.
If something changes and it stops working, I will post back in this thread but for right now you can mark it down that an AT&T labeled iPad Air CAN be activated on Verizon if you manually call it in and use the ICCID for activation without telling them it isn't a Verizon iPad.
Sorry for the hella long post but I know a lot of you guys were waiting for this information and now you have it.
I gotta go eat my cold dinner now!
