If you’re having issues with really slow performance, issues connecting to WiFi and Bluetooth and an all-around broken system after installing iPadOS 13.1 on your iPad Air 2, I have the solution.

The bad news: you’re going to have to wipe your iPad and restore from a backup.

The good news: your iPad will work as expected afterwards.

I’ve written more details at the bottom of the page. I’m sure you just want to fix you iPad. So here are the steps you’ll have to take:

1. Set up a WiFi network without a password. You may be able to do this with your WiFi router by creating a guest network. These broken installs can’t connect to WiFi if there’s a password (maybe because the performance is so slow they time out?). If you don’t know how to do this, contact your local geek or nerd
2. Go to Settings → General → Reset → Erase All Contents and Settings
3. Press the button and wait. It may appear as if it’s not working. It will eventually ask you to confirm and enter your AppleID password. I pressed the button dozens of times in a quiet rage. Just be patient, your iPad is running really slowly
4. If the confirmation dialogue doesn’t eventually pop up, you may have to “Erase all Settings”, first and then Erase all Contents and Settings. I had to do this on my GSM iPad.
5. Once the iPad has deleted everything and rebooted, run through the initial startup and restore from your last iCloud backup (or an iTunes backup - that’s not something I know anything about).
6. Wait for everything to be reinstalled. And there you go, a working iPad Air 2 running iPadOS 13.1.

These steps have worked on 2 iPads Air 2, my GSM version and my wife’s WiFi-only version. I fixed my GSM version using my phone’s SIM card in the iPad and connecting to the internet via 4G.

When I installed iPadOS 13.1, I had an issue where it would refuse to connect to my WiFi. No matter how many times I entered the password it would fail to connect. Additionally all my bluetooth devices appeared as “bluetooth accessory” and all my bluetooth devices failed to connect.

I thought I would be able to fix this all by wiping my iPad from iTunes on my iMac. Unfortunately, the 13.1 installation is so broken even iTunes returns an unknown error.

I’ve let Apple Support know about this. I’m not sure if this is going to be solved in future versions of iPadOS 13, because it’s only iPads Air 2 that appear to be affected, and only a small number at that.

If you have any feedback on this, hit me up on Twitter or Micro.blog.

Keywords: iPad Air 2, iPadOS 13, WiFi, Broken