When does 'Erase all content and settings' not do that on an iPhone ?

[Anastasius]

Answer...if you are logged into your iCloud account.

Recently sold an iPhone 6 and opted for "Erase all...etc" and sent it off to the buyer. Flurry of emails later and she asks me for my iCloud password as the phone has all my photos on it (actually...it's looking into the iCloud but that's bye-the-bye). Immediate thought was that she was trying a bit of social-engineering but then thought that a bit too tenuous and my tin hat put back in the cupboard.

Long story short...with Apple online support, turns out that the phone should have asked me for my Apple ID etc when I opted for Erase... but it didn't. So much to her surprise and mine, I was able to remotely erase all the data on that iPhone sitting on her desk in another part of the country. And so all reset so she could create/sign in with her Apple ID.

[Dave2002]

I get very wary of anything which says "Erase all ...". I wish developers wouldn't do that, and if there's something like that to be done, give more (and sufficient and accurate) explanation.

Another one which gets me is "Password". When installing new machines it's not always obvious if this is a password for a cloud or an Apple id, or "simply" the password for the current user of the current machine. It's also not helped in Apple's case by passwords not always working if terminated by a carriage return - but only if a mouse click is done on a designated part of the screen. I've fallen down over that a few times, and seen others do that too. "But I just put the password in, and wrote it down, and now it won't let me back in ...", "I've put the password in 5 times - I'm sure it's right - what's going wrong?" Sometimes followed by "I hate Apple!"

Just to confuse things further, Apple's passwords do sometimes work with a terminating return, but it depends on context.

Another glitch - the Voice Over feature in the installation software which manages to turn off some keystrokes on an Apple supplied keyboard. Things only start working "properly" once the installation is complete.

Doesn't anyone at Apple ever do real user testing?