Protecting data is perfectly possible without bricking the machine. Just wiping the encryption key as part of a full reset is enough for that.
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.