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Last week, we told you about the 1970 bug on the iPhone where your smartphone would effectively get bricked if you were to set the date to January 1, 1970 and restart the device. It was part of a hoax making its way around Facebook and other social networks, convincing people that they’d unlock a hidden Macintosh retro theme. All you got was a bricked iPhone instead.

Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news for all of you who fell for this trick. The good news is that your bricked iPhone can indeed get unbricked. The bad news is that you may need to invalid your warranty to do it and it’ll still cost you a few bucks.

To fix the 1970 bug, what you’ll need to do is disconnect the battery on your iPhone, wait a few seconds, and connect it back again. This resets the internal clock on your iPhone, forcing it to reset the date and effectively allowing your iPhone to boot up again. The bad news is, because the iPhone is all closed up, you’ll need to open it up to get at the battery.

There’s a quick tutorial video below from JerryRigEverything on how to do this. You’ll also need to invest in a set of pentalobe screwdrivers, since regular drivers don’t fit into iPhone screws. Of course, you do this totally at your own risk and discretion. If you want to be much safer about it, take your iPhone in to the Apple Store to get them to do it.

The not-so-subtle irony here is that if the iPhone had a user replaceable battery, the fix would be far easier. I’ve popped the battery out of my old phones many times when they get frozen for whatever reason. But with the way things are going, not only with iPhones but with Android and Windows 10 Mobile too, sealed designs are here to stay.

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