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Comment by throwaway0x7E6 | Hacker News Reader

what do you consider security here? you still lose the phone - the thief isn't going to return it to you, and he will still get some money for it from a fence.

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A bricked iPhone is worth way less than a functional one, making the victim much less of a “juicy” target (lower odds of a violent mugging, broken car window, home burglary, etc). It’s a perfectly rational decision to want iPhones to be known as worth 5% of their retail value if stolen. Less funding for organized criminal cartels, too.

the junkie who has drawn a knife on you, broke your car window or broke into your house is going to take your shit first and ask questions later

From an economic perspective the thief doesn't have any incentive to steal the device in the first place.

do you picture a mugger or a pickpocket caring about the economic perspective?

Of course they do. Until third party repair shops created a huge market for stolen iPhone parts, stealing them was significantly less attractive than other phones.

Well, they do. iPhones are still valuable after being parted out, although Apple has been combating this by requiring parts to be registered by them (and shamed for much of the same on HN)

> and shamed for much of the same on HN

Deservedly. If there was a normal market, or at least access to spare parts, there would be no need for donor devices.

Stolen parts are always going to be cheaper unless the cost of producing the parts is lower than the disassembly cost. That could happen for screws but it’s never going to happen for the advanced components which are why the devices are actually being stolen.

What does that look like? Stolen parts will always be cheaper.

The warehouses full of people in Shenzhen tearing down millions and millions of stolen iDevices would still be chugging along, inserting stolen parts into the supply chain.

Apple enforcing DRM on parts is very much a pro-consumer move, steadily taking us towards a world where a stolen iPhone will be worth nothing.

> he will still get some money for it from a fence.

From my understanding of the activation lock, the phone is effectively bricked - no-one can ever use it again. No fence is going to pay for a useless device.

The motherboard is useless. The rest of the parts can still be resold.

the lucrative parts (screen, camera arrays) are serialized and will not work on phones other than the one they were built for

almost everything else is soldered onto the logic board and is futile to transfer

so i think that stolen iphones with activation lock are 100% paperweights.

But it lowers the incentive significantly regardless.

Thankfully Apple is working on that by pairing the parts to the motherboard and showing error messages if they don't match.

That's one way of looking at it. Another one is that it complicates DIY repairs.

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