A large number of new iPhone 17 series devices cannot be activated, Apple responds
Image source: Apple's official website
Since the evening of October 13th, many users have reported on social platforms that when activating their newly purchased iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro Max, the activation screen shows, "This iPhone cannot be activated without an internet connection. Please try again, or connect this iPhone to a Mac or PC to activate it." Some netizens have tried connecting to Wi-Fi, using a mobile SIM card, or connecting to a hotspot from an old phone, but none of these methods have successfully activated the devices.
Page showing activation failure for iPhone users
A user from Beijing said that he bought the phone through a government subsidy program, and according to the regulations, the courier was required to open the package and activate the phone in person. Due to a server malfunction, after trying for an hour with the courier, they still couldn't activate the phone, and finally, the courier had to take the phone back.
On October 14th, Jiemian News called Apple's official customer service as a consumer. A customer service representative said that since today, they have received a large number of reports from users about the inability to activate new phones. The official has confirmed this as a widespread malfunction and has urgently reported it to the internal engineering and technical department for handling. However, the customer service representative said that they currently cannot provide a specific timeline for the fix.
According to Dongfang Financial News, an Apple Support staff member said that this might be an abnormal issue with the system. If it is indeed a system problem, besides changing the network, a relatively effective solution is to uninstall and reinstall the system on a computer (either a Mac or a Windows computer), after which the phone can be activated and used normally.
As of press time, Apple's official website has not issued a public statement regarding the inability to activate the new iPhone 17 series.
The Apple iPhone 17 and Pro series phones were released on September 10th and officially went on sale on September 19th, with prices starting from 5,999 yuan/8,999 yuan. At 8 p.m. on September 12th, the pre - sale of the iPhone 17 series officially started. Due to the high enthusiasm of users for the rush purchase, Apple's official website temporarily crashed.
According to JD.com data, within 6 hours of opening the reservation, the total number of reservations for the new iPhone 17 series exceeded 2 million. According to Yicai, on the first day of listing, the total number of reservations for the entire iPhone 17 series in the Tmall Apple Store official flagship store increased nearly three - fold compared to the initial launch period of the previous - generation iPhone 16 series. Among them, the white iPhone 17 model had the most reservation numbers.
However, before Chinese users received the iPhone 17 series products, Apple admitted that there were camera malfunctions in the iPhone 17 series and the iPhone Air. When directly exposed to extremely bright LED light, black squares and white curves might appear in the photos taken.
According to Hongxing Capital Bureau, a journalist participating in the evaluation of the iPhone Air found that when shooting at a concert, about one in every ten photos had small black screens and some white wavy lines. These abnormalities were caused by the strong light interference from the stage LED screen, which led to errors in the camera sensor recording and affected the final imaging effect.
Apple said that the above - mentioned problems only occur in extremely rare cases, such as when the LED display is very bright and directly shines on the camera. The company has fixed this problem and plans to release a fix, but it has not yet announced the specific time for pushing the patch.
However, the pre - sale of the iPhone Air's Chinese version will start at 9 a.m. on October 17th, and it will be officially available in offline stores on October 22nd. The updated sales information for the iPhone Air on Apple's official website in China shows that in mainland China, China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom can all provide eSIM support for this product.
In May this year, Apple also experienced a large - scale service outage that lasted about an hour. Initially, users were unable to log in to their Apple ID and iCloud accounts normally. Later, they couldn't complete payments through Apple Pay, and there were difficulties in checking out on the official website and in retail stores. In addition, some users encountered problems with the iCloud activation lock when trying to activate new devices.
This article is from the WeChat public account "Jiemian News". Author: Song Jianan. Republished by 36Kr with permission.