Tuesday night, my stepdad turned off his iPad. Turned off the screen, not the iPad. It has no passcode. We have five iPads in the house, two of them have passcodes, three of them do not. His does not. It never has. He goes to turn it on Wednesday afternoon when he wakes up, and it is asking for a passcode, six digits. Again, he has no passcode. I contact Apple, knowing what they are going to tell me, and sure enough, they tell me to factory reset. Okay, fine. I was pretty sure it was backed up, so, inconvenient, but not a big deal. So, I put it into recovery mode, and factory reset it with iTunes. Start it up, enter the AppleID and password, everything is fine. Try to restore from iCloud, and it asks for the passcode last used with this device, which, again, there never was one. So, I signed out, and factory reset from within the iPad itself. Went through the setup steps, chose restore from iCloud, and I was once again met with a passcode screen. This device has never had a passcode. This is where everything gets weirder, and dare I say, perhaps more frustrating. I enter 111111, knowing it is wrong. It is wrong. I enter 123456, knowing it is wrong, it is wrong. I then enter another wrong passcode, knowing it is wrong, but wondering if this screen will lock me out, as I am in setup, not on a lock screen. This third passcode is wrong, and it briefly showed the "try again later" message, but then immediately gives me access to the iCloud backup, and allows me to restore.

Since I have no idea what the hell just happened, I would like to ask all of you; what the hell just happened? It is an iPad 7th gen, running iPadOS 18.2.