Are all these macs stolen? Why aren't resellers requiring users to change/disclose their passwords or wipe the machine themselves before accepting the unit?
For legitimate transactions or ones where the data liabilities are fully disclosed, you can obviously get around this easily.
Activation lock isn't just data protection: It is Anti-theft. The concept was that bricking the hardware if it is stolen would reduce the, at the time, massive rise of theft. Activation lock on iOS (and all kinds of keying hardware to that board) basically shut down cell phone theft as they become worthless. They added the same to MacOS.
You haven't been paying attention then. In London, phone snatching (iPhones preferred) has been and remains an epidemic to the tune of tens of thousands a year - in a single city.
They might not be resold at full price, but even selling to a fence for parts is profitable if your acquisition cost is zero.
That would be extremely expensive to design. Probably impossible.
Especially when component level repair ala Louis Rossmann is possible.
You would need to add some general identifiers to parts with a GUID and at production/official repair time, register those parts to an iPhone S/N. If Activation locked, those parts would need to not be able to be registered to another iphone until the original device is unlocked, thus clearing those parts.
How are you going to lock down the phone body? Or the screen (not including the digitizer)? Which, coincidentally, are probably the 2 most damaged parts of a phone.
I suppose there's probably some way Apple could lock them down. But that seems like an expense wildly out of proportion to the potential benefit.
No thanks. The secondary repair market is extremely important to keep on life support.
If you cede all repair work to manufacturer blessed shops the amount of waste and expense skyrockets.
I want patched together laptops working 12 years from now, just like I have old T-series laptops from back in the day with various replacement parts humming away right now in my homelab. It's silly to just toss everything in the trash the moment is breaks.
Apple has started blacklisting parts associated with locked iPhones. At this point the only reusable bit is the case and possibly battery. The display, Face ID, Touch sensor, and such are all bricked. Overall the reduction is massive in any form. There isn't a 100% effective solution but you can easily cut down on 90%.
If it's your machine, it's not bricked. The owner can turn off Activation Lock though a web browser on any machine.
I'm sure some percentage of owners would allow that if it was just a click of a button and would help cut down on e-waste. As long as the machine isn't stolen and you know you're not going to expose any data then why not?
(...and if it is stolen then the owner can expect the recycler to explain where they got it from and return it.)
I actually prefer if Apple doesn't provide anyone with a way to contact me, ESPECIALLY if they have something potentially stolen from me.
I don’t mean that Apple allow a third party to contact anyone directly, I agree that that would be terrible.
Instead I could see Apple themselves contacting the last known owner to ask permission to wipe and open the laptop for reuse.
If that’s not what you want then you tell Apple the once and that’s the end of it.
Reuse won’t always be what people want but if a laptop can be repaired and securely reused then that’s much, much more energy efficient than recycling it.
so no to that. the solution to work as deterrent should be final: stolen device = brick device, no other possibility.
in the case of solving theft of devices we have to choose the price we want to pay. all solutions are based on various ways to deter the theft. there is no solution to stop the action of theft once started. thus all solutions have a price that could range from false positives (like legit owners being locked out) to waste like theft happens because they dont know that they cannot unlock it without destroying the device.
A person who is temporarily assigned the use of a company machine will not be able to prevent the legal owner of the machine from turning off activation lock.
However, Apple chooses not to do this unless they can establish that it is actually your device. Giving trade-in credit for activation locked devices would effectively be giving thieves an easy way to make money off of these otherwise useless devices, so they don't do that to avoid incentivizing theft.
It would be cool if Apple offered a program where these activation locked devices could be returned to Apple for free. Apple could contact the last known owner and let them know their device has been recovered. If Apple doesn't hear back from them, then they could wipe the device and sell it as refurbished, or recycle it (depending on how damaged it is). This avoids creating an incentive for thieves to steal, but also overcomes the e-waste argument.
It seems dubious to me. Shouldn’t the reseller withhold payment until the device is verified to be usable? And shouldn’t schools and businesses be incentivized to reset the devices since they want the full resale value?
I've seen businesses shred crates of completely unused and unprovisioned top of the line 16" macbook pros.
The company I work for has to do it from time to time with Apple's help. We have Mac users who, for example, return locked Macs when leaving the company... we unlock them then with Apple's help.
1. An insider (hard to get)
2. Phishing the owner (your device has been found, just sign into your Apple ID on this specific login form...)
3. Physically going to an Apple Store, with faked proof of purchase, and ideally a convincing disguise
4. Resell to some Chinese reseller (particularly because China doesn't use the same IMEI blocklist as the rest of the world), and take whatever they give you, and then it's not your problem anymore
Option #3 is surprisingly popular for petty criminals.
I had my account on this. I formatted and that when I saw that I will not be able to re-install anything that I realized I bricked a perfectly fine machine.
Oh well.
They are getting pissy because Apple trashed their probability game.
hardly justifies turning working technology into a brick