Hacker News Reader

Comment by kurthr | Hacker News Reader

Having a single apple device on an iCloud account sounds like a security risk. I was in a similar situation out of sheer stupidity (new device, went on vacation, forgot unlock code), but I was eventually able to recover using an old linked iPad, the iCloud password, email, and time.

The interesting bit is theives ability to disable FindMy, it's effects, and following sequence of events.

View on HN

> out of sheer stupidity

I have to push back on this. It's not stupidity to not realize you need another Apple device to have any reasonable chance of navigating their support channels. It's not something they go out of their way to teach you about, until you learn the hard way. Indeed it's an infuriating (IMO) dark pattern.

Don't blame yourself or others - this is on Apple!

EDIT

My personal brush with this was when my wife's phone was lost/stolen/etc and she forgot her iCloud password. Even though she had not one but two active macbooks, the fact that the credit card she'd registered with iCloud caused weeks of delay from Apple. They wouldn't budge unless we entered the original CC number, but their system rejected it due to the expiration. Madness! I'm glad that I had an internal contact - most people would have been locked out for good. These days I use a thinkpad...

I think parent’s use of “stupid” is referring to themself going on vacation and immediately forgetting their unlock code.

Regaining access to a single device that has been robbed and unlocked at gunpoint is a tough scenario. But I agree that there must be better support patterns to recognize and deal with such a scenario… the rather unfortunate thing I see here is his brother falling for a phishing scam, which yes ultimately will lose the device for good (physical access + password). That is harder to deal with from the support end, I’d imagine.

Many years ago I had my iPad stolen on a train. Realised what had happened while we were still between stations. In theory all I needed to do was use the find my device function on my phone and walk the train until my iPad connected to my phone.

Except the bloody thing wouldn't work on my Android phone. The page was just telling me to download the iCloud app from an Apple device.

I didn't get the iPad back and haven't purchased anything from Apple since.

It does especially when learning from the article, with Argentina's average income, earning an extra device is no small feat:

"An iPhone is not cheap in general, and in Argentina less so. The current price for an iPhone 13 is ca. 400.000 ARS, which roughly translates to 2200 USD or 1300 USD at the unofficial rate (it's complicated). With an average monthly salary of 427 USD (according to Numbeo) you can see that getting a new iPhone is not a choice to take lightly."

I thought it was rupees. Oops. The Rs in ARS doesn't mean Rupees. Less than an order of magnitude difference, though.

More countries have Rupees than I thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupee

Reply on news.ycombinator.com