How to Turn Off Find My iPad Activation Lock
February 15th, 2021
Today's video is going to be about how to turn off the "Find My..." feature on an iPad (transcript below).
Now what is the Find My feature you might ask? Well it's basically an anti-theft feature so that if you lose your iPad or maybe it's stolen and then that person erases your iPad, it basically turns into a brick. When they go through the welcome screens, again it's going to say "hey this iPad is already linked to someone else's iCloud ID and it will not let them proceed through the welcome screen." So it's a really nice anti-theft feature, but what if you're selling your iPad or maybe you're giving it away to someone else. You don't want that Find My feature to be on still because that new person will get your iPad they'll try to register it to their iCloud account, and it'll say "hey you can't do it because it's still tied to your iCloud account." So we're going to show you how to remove it.
Now the preferred way to do it is to turn off the Find My feature on the iPad itself, but don't worry if you don't have the iPad in your possession, I will show you the remote method as well. So let's show how to remove the Find My feature on the iPad itself. So first we're going to open up our Settings page here and we're going to click on our iCloud account, and then we're going to navigate over here to the Find My section and then you can see right here the Find My feature is turned on. And so we're going to tap that and then we have a toggle switch right here and so we're just going to tap that toggle button and that is going to turn off the Find My feature. So it's going to ask for your password for security and then as soon as you enter that in it might send you a two-step authentication code if you have that turned on, otherwise it's going to turn that off. Now I'm going to hit cancel for now because I'm going to show you the remote option in case you don't have the iPad in your possession anymore, but again the preferred method to turn off the Find My iPad feature is simply on the device itself by tapping that toggle button right there on the Find My iPad page. Now if you can't find it and you forget where that Find My feature is, another way to get to it is just go into the search bar up here and you just type in the word "find" and you'll see it brings up that same section here and it'll pull it up, and that way you can get to it a little bit more easily.
All right well let me show you how to do the remote removal option. Now you can turn off the Find My iPad feature from just about any computer that's connected to the internet. Here I've got one with Safari open and I'm going to type in the URL icloud.com/find. Now that last part is very important as that will take us directly to the page we need to be on. So just remember it's icloud.com/find. Now you can see here first it's going to ask for our User ID and so we're going to go ahead and enter that in, and then we'll click the "Next" button, and then it's going to ask for our password as well. Now once you log-in you can see it takes you to a page with a map in the background. And so that's how you know you've landed on the right spot when you see a map in your background. Now up at the top we're going to click on the "All Devices" menu and you can see here it's going to list all your devices that have the Find My feature turned on. We only have one right now and this indeed is the iPad that we want to disable, so we're going to click on that iPad. And when we click on it it's going to show the last known location for that particular device and also bring up this side panel here on the upper right corner of the browser window. Now you might be thinking, "how do I remove it from my account because you only have these three options?" You've got "Play Sound," "Lost Mode," and then "Erase iPad." There's no remove from account, and this is where it gets just a little bit tricky.
So in order to see the remove from account option you first have to initiate the erase iPad option and then the remove option shows up. I think Apple did this because they want to make sure that you definitely have your device erased before you remove it because once you remove it you don't have access anymore. So first thing we're going to do is click on the "Erase iPad" option here with the trash can. And then you can see it's going to give you a confirmation message just to make sure that's really what you want to do, and it is. So we will click "Erase" and now for security it's going to have you re-enter your iCloud password, then we click the "Next" button and if you have two-factor authentication turned on it's going to send a code to one of your devices, and you'll simply enter that code in. If it's the first time you've used this browser it's going to ask if you want to trust—we can just hit "not now."
Now you'll see it's giving us a few more options here in the upper right of your browser window. The first is it's asking for a phone number. Now if you indeed did lose your iPad or somebody stole it you certainly could enter your phone number in here and that way whoever finds it would see your phone number and could reach out to you. But here we just want to remove the iPad and so we're not going to enter a phone number. Same thing here on the message we don't want to enter a message, but again if you did lose your iPad you could put a message in here for someone to reach out to you later. Then we're going to click the "Done" button in the upper right corner, and then we get one last confirmation message that the iPad is being erased, so we'll click the "OK" button here. And I don't know if you caught it, but here on the panel in the upper right just for a split second there was a "Stop Erase" request option that popped up. If your iPad is not connected to the internet then you can stop the erase request and then this "Remove from Account" option appears.
Now don't stop yet, this last step is really important! You do need to follow through and actually click the "Remove from Account" option in order to completely disassociate your Apple ID from the device. So now we're going to click on "Remove from Account." And again it's going to ask us one more time to confirm. Once we click "Remove" we no longer have the option to remotely erase or control this iPad, but that is our intent here, so we're going to click "Remove." And look at that—you can see now we have no devices. Now if you had other devices on the Find My feature within your iCloud account you would still see them up on the menu here where it says "All Devices," but because this was the only device we had on our iCloud account now we're seeing a map in the background with no devices. And that means the iPad is completely removed from our iCloud account and disassociated with the Find My feature.
Now let me interject with one important distinction to make. Here a lot of times when folks are trying to remove the Find My feature on their iPad or other device they end up landing on this iCloud settings page where it shows your devices. And you can see here it shows an iPad and a MacBook Pro—both of these were not showing up anymore on the Find My page, but they are showing up in devices. So a lot of times people will mistakenly land here on the iCloud settings page they'll go to their devices click on one and they'll see this "X" here and they'll think, "Hey if I click on the X that's going to remove the device from your account." Well really think of this with your devices almost like a history of different devices that you signed into with your iCloud account. And so this is actually completely separate from the Find My feature. Now you certainly can "X" these out and remove them from your iCloud account, but that is not going to impact the Find My status, so just make sure that you actually land on the Find My page. If for some reason you do end up on the iCloud settings page you just click on the menu up here in the upper left and then look for that green target icon that says "Find iPhone." I know it's a little bit confusing because you're actually trying to find your iPad or find your Mac perhaps, but basically they just call it "Find iPhone" and that takes you to the screen to turn that feature off.
Well I hope you found this video helpful. Here at Jay Brokers we deal with these sorts of issues quite frequently as you can imagine. We are a risk-free secondhand marketplace. We buy all sorts of gadgets and guitars, cameras and collectibles—pretty much anything worth over $100 bucks that's easy to ship. So if you're looking to sell your Apple product—maybe you've got a watch that you're looking to upgrade or an iPhone—definitely check us out. You can get an instant cash offer on over 2,500 common products on our website 24/7 from the convenience and safety of your home. A couple things our customers really appreciate about Jay Brokers is, first off we always pay the agreed upon amount for the agreed-upon item. No bait-and-switch gimmicks, and secondly we always send payments out on the next business day after receipt, rain or shine. So if you've got something to sell and it's worth over $100 bucks—chances are we will consider it. Go ahead and check us out online at jaybrokers.com that's j-a-y-brokers.com and get yourself an instant offer from the convenience and safety of your home 24/7. We would sincerely like to earn your business, so if you have any questions please don't hesitate to reach out to us. Thanks for watching!
