iPad Pro Restoring an iPad Pro 1 from 2016

[Certificate of Excellence]

I was charged with restoring my Moms iPad as she forgot what the password was - ok fine. I tried restoring the old 2016 iPad pro with iTunes 12.8.3 on my old MBP/El Cap. The Mac would find it, download the restore package but the update would fail when verifying with Apple prior to restore/installation. I switched to updating through finder in Ventura on my M2 MBP and the update worked flawlessly.

If both systems are able to see the iPad, find and download the needed package for restore, I'm trying to understand why Apple would allow both to download the needed packages and proceed with the restore on Ventura but the restore on El Cap/Itunes would fail? From what I understand, iTunes versions 12.6.5.3 and later can still communicate with Apple servers and I confirmed that this is the case on my El Cap machines.

Either way, I got it done NBD but am curious about this. I wonder if an older, era appropriate iPad would have updated successfully - one that doesn't need to verify the restore file perhaps? Alas, my middle kiddo stuck my iPad 2 in the toilet LOL so it died and cannot test this hypothesis.

 

[FeliApple]

Some years back, El Cap broke with newer iOS versions. I’m running El Cap on my 2015 MacBook Pro, and it now says it needs a software update to connect to my devices.

I don’t know how far back that goes, as I haven’t connected my iPhone Xʀ on iOS 12 to iTunes, but I will have to update (sadly) an iPhone 11 that’s on iOS 14 and I know it won’t work.

I did update my 9.7-inch iPad Pro back when Apple forced me out of iOS 9 into the then-current iOS 12, and it worked, but I don’t think it worked for much longer.

I think restoring an iPad 2 into iOS 9 should work. I won’t test that theory, though. My A5 device (an iPod touch 5G) runs iOS 6.0.