Everyone who has young children and iPhones has probably plucked it from a pair of little hands at one time or another and found that it was completely locked down for one minute because of too many invalid PIN entries.

For most it’s a reasonably minor inconvenience, but for one man in China it became a lifelong commitment as he was asked to wait about 45 years for his next chance to remember his personal identification number for his iPhone 4s. Really though, if he can’t remember it by then, it’s safe to say he never will.

According to a report by the Qianjiang Evening News, the man put an incorrect PIN number five times into his iPhone 4s but rather than being told to cool off for a minute he was greeted by this message.

“iPhone is disabled – try again in 23,614,974 minutes”

That’s 44 years, 328 days, 6 hours and 54 minutes or to put it another way; Jay-Z’s The Black Album played in a loop 425,239 times and once more until about three minutes into “99 Problems.”

The man then went to a repair shop for help and was told he would have to restore the device and lose all of his data or else live with his designer paperweight for a good chuck of his life.

Qianjiang Evening News contacted an Apple representative who said that this type of problem would be impossible for a regular user to experience. Although lock-out times get incrementally longer with each incorrect PIN entry after five tries, the man would have theoretically had to have been locked out longer than the iPhone 4s’s existence to have worked his way up to 45 years.

Apple suggested that the man had jailbroken his iPhone to get such a lock glitch. Jailbreaking is the process of bypassing an operating system’s (usually intentional) limitations in order to use a device in ways not originally intended by the creators. Apple, however, frowns on such practices and warns that it may cause their phones to become unstable.

Apple also warns that jailbreaking will void the warranty on an iPhone, which might explain why the man was going to a third-party repair shop rather than Apple themselves. This still didn’t stop many Chinese netizens from assuming the man had gotten his hands on a knock-off iPhone 4s rather than any failed hacking attempt. Either way, the moral of this story is always back your s**t up, ballers.

Sorry, I’m on my third time through.

Source: Niconico News (Japanese)
Top image: RocketNews24