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They have started to introduce random serials to some product lines: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/05/purple-iphone-12-random...

I imagine this will be extended in the future so that they can begin to clamp down.

If you know a valid serial number (say from a decommissioned Mac) do you know if you're able to just use that or is there some sort of validation of the device to the serial number?

There's no validation right now, but they could do that if they wanted to.

>by requiring a real serial number

I assume you could just buy some $10 iphone 3gs to grab a number from.

I used a real serial number for this and still never had much success doing so, was a giant pain in the ass about a year ago.

Surprisingly, in my case it worked first try. It needed a compatible wireless card being present though - I think the Wi-Fi MAC is also used as some kind of identifier in addition to the serial number alone.

I have an old iPhone, could I use a serial number from that potentially?