Lots of people who hold iPhone jailbreaking near and dear to their hearts remember the sinking feeling they felt when Apple announced that iOS 17 wouldn’t run on the iPhone X and older devices. This decision effectively ended the use of the checkm8 exploit to jailbreak any iPhone firmware newer than iOS 16.
Despite this, the palera1n development team continued to add support for jailbreaking a very small subset of checkm8-vulnerable iPads that still run iPadOS 17. Those included:
- iPad (6th generation) (A10 chip)
- iPad (7th generation) (A10 chip)
- iPad Pro 12.9-inch (2nd generation) (A10X chip)
- iPad Pro 10.5-inch (A10X chip)
Unfortunately, new rumors are swirling around that Apple’s upcoming iPadOS 18 update could drop support for the aforementioned iPads, effectively ending the use of the checkm8 exploit to jailbreak iPad firmware newer than iPadOS 17.
According to a post shared by MacRumors, the rumor began with a post shared on X (formerly Twitter) by a user with a “proven track record.” Soon after learning of the rumor, iOS developer and palera1n jailbreak contributor @itsnebulalol shared the following post to X:
If the rumor turns out to be true, then R.I.P. checkm8-based jailbreaks indeed…
The first checkm8 jailbreak debuted as checkra1n, and it originally began with support for iOS 12 on the iPhone X and older. After a while, the checkra1n jailbreak stopped receiving updates, and the palera1n team released the palera1n jailbreak supporting iOS & iPadOS 15 and later on checkm8-vulnerable devices.
While the checkm8 exploit is an unpatchable hardware-based bootrom exploit, Apple can stop supplying software updates to affected devices. This means that while those devices can be jailbroken for life, they’ll be incapable of running the latest firmware, which could prompt many people to ditch those older devices and upgrade to newer ones.
Apple unquestionably wants nothing more than to ditch checkm8 devices for good, as the checkm8 exploit is a thorn in the company’s side. Apple continues to beef up device security not only with each major hardware release, but also with each software update – no matter how big or small. In fact, we only recently got our first jailbreak for A12+ devices running iOS 16.
While we certainly hope that these devices will go on to support at least one more generation of firmware updates, the fact remains that Apple wants to bury checkm8 once and for all so that the company can move on. It remains to be seen if we’ll ever see another exploit as powerful as checkm8, as bootrom exploits such as it surface only once in a blue moon.
Would you be upset if Apple ended support for checkm8-vulnerable iPads starting with iPadOS 18? Let us know in the comments section down below.