(Original 2025-01-27) Last week, my 10-year-old accidentally broke her old iPad (iPad gen 7th 32gb space gray). My 14-year-old said partial reason was the case was broken and didn’t provide enough projection. I was not upset about it, as this sort of thing is a part of life nowadays. The iPhone and iPad glasses are fragile, and they tend to break, if they land on hard surfaces. Our old daughter made a similar but slightly more costly mistake on my old iPhone XR about 14 months ago. That’s also how I got my new iPhone 15 shortly after, so that I can give my old iPhone 12 to her.
I did offer her (10-year-old) a new iPad recently as her current one is running out of space and cannot update to newer versions of iOS or iPad OS. That caused some issues such as she could not install certain apps 🙁
How we setup her new iPad (iPad 10th gen, we bought the pink one). Mainly we setup her own Apple account this time. In terms of new iPad setup, I used Mac Mini to transfer a backup copy of her old iPad to Mac Mini, then from Mac Mini I transferred that content to her new iPad. We used the USB cables in both instances (which is faster than Wi-Fi).
Setup her own Apple account took some time. It’s a child account and has less privilege than mine. Initially we tried to log into her new iPad, we were not successful. Took a few attempts. As her dad, I can see her account from my iCloud account.
After setting everything setup, I signed out from her new iPad (old iPad was using my iCloud account). And signed in using her own account. After that I need to authorize her to download couple apps or update them. Also, for Roblox, I believe the minimum age is 12, so I chose 12+ in the initial iPad setup. The rest are mostly default, such as Apple Pay (no credit card for now, which means she needs my attention to buy something).
Last but not least, I plan to bring the broken iPad in my upcoming China summer trip: hopefully I can find someone to fix it in a reasonable cost, and I plan to use it myself. It will be my 2nd personal iPad if it works out. Last summer I did bring back the broken iPhone XR and had it repaired, it worked only for a brief period, and I eventually did sell it on eBay – I explicitly listed the conditions and showed the pictures of the phone there. I may do it same if things don’t work out. At least, I don’t want to sell the broken iPad AS IS. (Update: actually I ended up selling the broken iPad as is, just like how I sold my broken iPhone). In both cases I erase everything from the device, and the buyer is likely going to use the device for the parts. Because although the screen is broken, the buyer can use other parts on the device as they are still good.
PS (02-07-2025) Today I learned how to Force Restart the iPad
Update (12-10-2025) I had to force restart my daughter’s school iPad (this time I refreshed my memory by watching this YouTube video). I suspect the hard case probably has something to do with the iPad being locked up like this. I recall last time (Feb 2025, refer to the above comment), the iPad was also in a hard case (it appears Google Gemini disagree with me on this).
“Locking Up” in Error If you mean the iPad becomes completely unresponsive or frozen, this is a technical issue and generally not a direct result of the case material itself (hard plastic or polycarbonate).”
Btw, I added some comments to the above YouTube video:
This is even better than Apple’s own instructions: which I followed but didn’t work. Note we just need to press (release) the volume down button, then press (release) the volume up button, at last hold the main button. Apple’s instructions led me to do an “extra” push and release – we just need a normal push and release on those 2 volume buttons.