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Comment by jagger27 | Hacker News Reader

I remember when stealing peoples iPhones and iPods on the subway was affectionately referred to as “apple picking” by the perpetrators. iCloud locking has cut that down to almost nothing.

Rather not go back to the “fun” old days.

Agreed.

Thanks to the miracle of what is now called "Find My," I got to watch as my wife's newly stolen iPhone made its way from Rome to Tunisia. Unfortunately, in its early iterations, you could only locate an item, not take any action on that item.

I suspect that wouldn't happen today, since I could now remotely lock the phone.

Such a strong pipeline of stolen Apple devices -> backdoor shady PC repair shops -> North Africa. I too got to watch my buddies iPhone’s live journey. At least it was a bit entertaining.

Why do this for even phones not marked as stolen? The video even suggests having a "timeout" of only allowing a reset after 30 days of inactivity, at which point the original owner has gotten plenty of time to mark it as stolen.

The thing is that almost none of what I'm talking about are marked as stolen. They're just old devices bricked because they weren't removed from an account.

Objectively, what is the difference? With no real information, how can you tell?

Objectively, the result is a mountain of e-waste.

edit: and of course, "Mark as lost" is a separate thing from iCloud locking. That's the difference.

> referred to as "apple picking" by the perpetrators

There was a missed opportunity here to call it scrumping

"To steal fruit, especially apples" - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scrump

Agreed, they should add a 30 day expiration and send people a reminder to set their device to stolen if they haven't done so yet (if it was actually stolen). If the device is lost give them the option to extend the auto removal of the lock. If by expiration of that time period and the device was not marked stolen it should be unlocked so that it doesn't become e-waste because someone forgot their password and reset their phone.

Second Apple should provide a way to verify if a phone is locked to allow people who purchase phones on eBay to not get f'd. I see no reason for Apple not to provide this service again.

Third, apple should to take back all phones that are marked as stolen and recycle, refurbish or whatever without compensating the person who brought it in.

What if the stolen iPhone was your only way to access your email/iCloud? You might not be able to confirm it as stolen then.

I do agree that e-waste can be a problem, but unlocking the iPhone seems trivially easy, and as noted in this article, the real problem is that when devices you own break, they might become very expensive paperweights (aka e-waste) as repairing them might cost more than the device is currently worth.

And I believe Apple already has a program where they can recycle an iPhone back to spare parts without compensation as you describe.

That small percentage of people who can't mark their phones as stolen is not zero but it's small enough for theives not to bother stealing a device which 9 out of 10 times is unusable. The upside however of being able to recover a non stolen phone is so much higher.

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