Your phone arrived locked. Here is how to fix it.

If we have told you your phone arrived locked, nothing has gone wrong and nobody is in trouble. It almost always means Find My was still switched on when the phone went in the envelope. Apple calls the result Activation Lock, and it does exactly what it is designed to do: it makes the phone useless to anybody who is not you.

That is why we cannot pay for it. A locked phone cannot be erased, cannot be tested properly, and cannot be sold on to anybody. It is worth nothing to us until the lock comes off, and we will not pretend otherwise or quietly drop our offer and hope you do not notice.

Here is the part that matters: only you can remove it. Not us, not Apple, not the shop down the road, and anybody who tells you they can is either lying or doing something you do not want to be part of. The good news is that you can do it from wherever you are, without the phone in your hand.

On a computer or another phone, go to iCloud.com and sign in with the Apple ID that was on the device. Open Find Devices, choose the phone from the list, and select Erase This Device. Once it has erased, the same screen offers Remove This Device from the account. Do both. That second step is the one that clears Activation Lock, and it is the step people miss.

If the phone still shows as offline, erase it anyway. Apple queues the instruction and applies it the moment the device is connected, which for a phone sitting on our bench is as soon as we power it up to check.

Cannot remember which Apple ID it was? The lock screen on the device shows a hint, and we will tell you what it says if you ask us. If the account genuinely is not recoverable, Apple can help, but they will want proof of purchase with the serial number on it, and that is a slower road.

There is a second kind of lock we sometimes see: a work profile, called MDM or Device Supervision. That one belongs to whoever gave you the phone, usually an employer or a school, and only their IT team can release it. If a phone came from a job you have left, that is the call to make.

Once the lock is off, tell us and we will re-test the phone the same working day. If it is as described, you get the price you were originally quoted, not a lower one. We have not moved the goalposts; we just could not check it.

And if you would rather have it back, say so and it comes back to you free of charge and tracked, exactly as it would at any other point in the process. Locked or not, your phone is yours.