HOW TO UNLOCK A DECEASED PERSON’S REMAINING DEVICES WITHOUT LEGACY ACCESS
The last few years have seen highly elevated levels of unexpected deaths of those around us. Preparations people might once have made as they aged or experienced a terminal illness are overlooked when they are gone in a moment. Survivors are left with loss and the material remains of that person’s life, including their hardware.
The saddest thing I have to tell people who write in after someone close to them has passed away is that they can’t access the stored photos, letters, and other parts of a person’s life. In some cases, of course, people wish their life’s digital record to end with them. Most of the time, it’s an accident, due to a lack of planning or knowledge.
Apple offers a way to gain access to most of the material someone has stored in an iCloud account through its Digital Legacy program, introduced two years ago. If you want to take the steps now to preserve access to your iCloud-stored information—or help a loved one or colleague take the steps—read “How to Set Up a Legacy Contact for Your iCloud Account.”
Digital Legacy won’t help you recover device access, though: Apple can’t recover passcodes for iPhones or iPads, or account passwords for macOS. Someone has to choose to leave that information behind.
However, if you’ve inherited hardware that had Find My enabled and
