I was reading up on iPhones, since I just got one. If you set the date back to January 1st of 1970 on a iPhone, it will permanently lock your iPhone, I repeat do not do this. You will need a manual reset or a new phone. ~Ben
Yeah, my phone is completely shattered and sound buttons don't work so was getting a new phone anyway
Yea, there's a few things that will brick your iPhone, this is one of them. Another thing is if you have your iPhone repaired by any company that isn't an Authorized Apple Repair Center and then you do an iOS update to the latest version(especially if they replace the Home button and the cables that lead to it). I support Smartphones(all flavors), PDAs and computers for my company.
I turned my phones time setting 10 years ahead once to mess with a game but I've never gone 40 years behind
Interesting fact: All Unix (-like) systems use a fixed point in time called the Epoch to start their date calculation, and this date is none other than the 1st of January 1970. It is for this reason why Unix systems never had any issue with the "dreaded" Millennium bug for the simple reason that they basically only had to cope with 30 years at that point. Why I mention this? Because all of Apples operating systems are based on Unix. Ergo: those started counting from the Epoch by default, so setting your date back to that position wouldn't do a thing. Simply because the OS already started counting at that point. Pretty dumb joke, from an obviously dumb source (edit: 4chan). If they had put a little more thought to it (but that requires reading I guess, <shudder>) then they'd announce that setting a date before the epoch would cause issues. That might have made it a little more credible than it is now