How to sign out of iCloud on iPad and change your Apple ID account
If you are a prudent user, you probably use the “Find iPad” option on your Apple tablet, with which you can return the missing device through a linked iCloud account. However, if you suddenly decide to sell your device, you, as an honest person, simply must turn off “Find iPad” and unlink it from iCloud before transferring the gadget to the new owner, so as not to bring him into serious trouble.
In this article we will tell you how to properly unlink an iCloud account from an iPad, as well as what difficulties face a user who purchased a device with “Find iPad” not disabled.
Find My iPad was created by Apple to protect its products from theft ( Similar options are available on the iPhone and iPod, called “Find iPhone” and “Find iPod” respectively.), or rather in order to make the theft of the device pointless.
If the user has enabled the option on the iPad, then if the device is stolen, he can log into his iCloud cloud service account using his Apple ID data and activate “Lost Mode” in the “Find iPad” menu.
As a result, the iPad will be locked and will require you to specify the 4-digit password set when activating the lost mode. By the way, when activating the mode, the user can also enter a special message and his coordinates, which will be displayed on the locked screen - that is, if the gadget is lost and not stolen, the person who finds it can call the owner and return the device.
Quite often, “resourceful” thieves try to bypass the need to specify a 4-digit password by entering the device into DFU mode and restoring it using iTunes, but, unfortunately, there is a catch here. After restoring the tablet with the “Find iPad” option active on it, during the initial setup you will need to specify your Apple ID, and if it is unknown (and how would a thief know it?), you will not get further than the screen asking you to enter your Apple ID. This mechanism is called activation blocking.
Notably, Activation Lock is automatically enabled the moment you activate Find My iPad. This means that even if Lost Mode is not activated, but “Find My iPad” is enabled, then, for example, after restoring the device through iTunes during the initial setup, you will be asked for your Apple ID password.
How to sign out of iCloud?
Now, you can probably guess why it is so important to delete your iCloud account and disable the Find My iPad option when selling your device? If not, here is an example.
Look, the new owner is using your used iPad with iCloud unlinked and knows no grief, and then one day he encounters some kind of system failure, from which even super reliable Apple technology is not immune. The user is forced to restore the tablet through iTunes. And this is how it ends - the restoration has been successfully completed, the initial setup interface is automatically loaded, but to start it, you will need to enter your Apple ID password, which you, of course, did not tell the buyer.
If you are not a misanthrope, then you are unlikely to want to put a person in such a situation, fortunately, to prevent it you need to do very little:
1 Open Settings on iPad. 2 Find the item “iCloud”.
3 Scroll to the bottom of the menu and click on the “Sign Out” button - you will need to enter your Apple ID password to confirm signing out. Forgot your Apple ID? Use the iForgot service! 
4 After entering the password, the account information will be erased from the tablet menu, and the “Find My iPad” option will be automatically disabled. Don’t forget to also erase all data from the device before selling it - “Settings” / “General” / “Reset” / “Erase content and settings”.
So, as you can see, the answer to the question of how to disable Find My iPad and how to delete your account from the device is very simple! In addition, if for some reason it is inconvenient for you to exit iCloud through the tablet menu, you can use the cloud service website.
1 Go to iCloud.com and enter your Apple ID information.
5 If the device is online, click Erase iPad. 
Important! Before exiting iCloud in one way or another, be sure to create a backup copy of your data either through the device menu (“Settings” / “iCloud” / “Backup” - activate the “Backup to iCloud” slider, click the “Create a backup” button), or using iTunes (connect your iPad to your PC with iTunes, click the device icon, then “Browse” / “Create a copy now” / “Apply”).
Rules for buying an iPad: how to avoid activation lock?
When buying a used device secondhand, you can never be sure of the seller’s honesty - perhaps this is an ordinary person who has saved up for a new i-gadget and is therefore selling an old one, but it is possible that you are faced with a scammer trying to sell stolen device.
It should be noted that in both cases you can get an iPad with activation lock not turned off, only in the first case you will be set up out of ignorance, and in the second - intentionally. Again, in the first case, when faced with a requirement to enter an Apple ID, you will be able to contact the previous owner, and if he is a caring person, he will definitely help you unlink. In the second, you won’t find a trace of the fraudulent seller and will be left alone with a tablet that just constantly asks for a password and can’t do anything else.
If you are preparing to purchase a used gadget, we will give you a number of tips that will protect you from buying a gadget with activation lock not disabled.
If you have already become a victim of this depressing case, unfortunately, there is little good news for you. How to get out of this situation? You have only two options - try to contact the seller to unlink it or contact Apple support and prove that the device belongs to you (you will need a receipt and the box from the device for proof). If neither one nor the other path is possible for one reason or another, changing the Apple ID to your own and removing the activation lock will not work. This, as you understand, is not a 4-digit numeric password; brute force here does not make the slightest sense. By the way, even a 4-digit code can have as many as 10,000 combinations!
However, it is worth noting that today there are quite a lot of “masters” who offer services to remove this blocking, but (!) in many cases you risk attacking new scammers - they will simply take your money, but access to the gadget will not be restored, so that if you decide to take such a step, approach the choice of the executor who will remove the blocking as responsibly as possible.
But let's return to a more positive situation - you are just getting ready to buy a used device. How to protect yourself from buying a locked gadget and from asking for someone else's Apple ID? Quite simple! Open the “Settings” of the device, tap the iCloud item, note that the fields for filling out account information should be blank, and the “Find iPad” option should be disabled. In most cases, this guarantees you trouble-free use of the device.
However! Cases have already been described on the Internet several times when a user bought a device with “Find iPad” disabled and was even able to change empty fields to his account in the iCloud menu of the device, but after being forced to restore the gadget, he still encountered an activation lock and required data specifically from Apple ID of the previous owner, and not the parameters changed by the new owner. This means that checking the decoupling through the device menu does not provide a 100% guarantee that activation lock is disabled.
However, until recently, such a 100% way to check whether the blocking was enabled did exist. This was an official service created by Apple, it was located at the address - http://icloud.com/activationlock. By entering the serial number or IMEI of the device in a special field, the user could check the blocking status. But just a month ago, the service was closed when it became known that some hackers had come up with a way to use this platform to unlock stolen devices. This, of course, forced Apple to close the service and at the moment, unfortunately, there is no alternative to it.
Let's summarize
So, if your device is not signed out of iCloud and Find My iPad is turned on, then it has Activation Lock, which will appear, for example, after you restore the device, even if Lost Mode is turned off.
This is why it is very important when selling a device to log out of your account, and when buying, to be as vigilant as possible - you definitely need to check whether you have logged out of iCloud, and whether “Find iPad” is disabled, but (!) since this check does not give a full guarantee Since the lock will not make itself felt after restoring the device, and there is no 100% method for checking the status of the activation lock today, it is better to refuse to buy a used tablet and buy an older device, but not a used one - for example, an iPad 4 instead of iPad Air.
Well, if a used gadget is your only option, try to at least look for a seller among your friends and acquaintances.
