Bought an iPad but it's supervised.Is there a way to remove it?

Question

I bought an iPad Air 2 from a third party and I see it's supervised.It has many restrictions.There is no delete button in Settings.The iPad is iCloud free.I tried restoring it in recovery mode, restore and update in iTunes and then Set up as new, erase all data from the iPad but the configuration won't be removed.When it's being set up it says "retrieving configuration".I tried iActivate win but it says that it's not in their servers.

From what I've read, if the configuration persists then it's in DEP.Can it be removed from DEP somehow? Is there a WAY to make this iPad a normal one so I can use it?

Answer 1

Supervised devices lock in management, so your only recourse is to wipe the device. At that point you may discover that it’s also an enrolled device (DEP) and wiping does not unenroll from DEP as that is different than a MDM profile.

You cannot, by yourself, remove the iPad from DEP. The iPad has all these restrictions because it was previously managed by a company or school. You’ll need to figure out which school or company it is and send their IT and email and hope that they will remove it from their program for you. Their and IT and only their IT can unenroll an iPad from DEP.

You likely have bought an iPad that a student/teacher/employee/malicious actor stole. I doubt that an IT department knowledgeable enough to use DEP wouldn’t know to disown the devices before resale.

Also, I know this question will likely attract a lot of attention by students wishing to remove their devices from DEP: short answer, you can’t. Long answer: if you jailbreak the device you can remove the profile. This change will persist while you are on that iOS version and maybe once you update however if you restore the device it’ll come back. I of course don’t recommend this and you’ll violate your school policy (and IT will know, it’s not hard to detect a jailbroken device).

Answer 2

For the record, I just put my iPad in recovery mode and reloaded it without issue. We have several 12" iPads Model a1670. We use them in a museum and tried using single-app mode to prevent patrons from messing with them. However the management macbook became corrupted and we could no longer make changes to them. We found that guided access offers more flexibility.

Bottom line, using iPad recovery mode with iTunes worked perfectly.