I understand you're upset, but sadly I have to say to you that this is working as intended.
1) You bought a machine and can't prove it.
2) You enabled authentication which you lost
3) You also lost your backup to the account
How can they help you? How can anyone help you?
You've made it nearly impossible to distinguish yourself from a thief or random stranger.
Well, that's the fundamental problem. With open hardware that you fully and completely own when you buy it, such problems are impossible.
The move towards hardware (mostly by Apple but not unique to them) that remains firmly in control of the vendor even after you buy it... is not a good one. It means your ownership is relatively ephemeral, any wrong move (or bug) and it's no longer yours to use.
Not a world I want to live in.
A corporation buying hardware from another corporation. The “user” here is and was never in control of the hardware. The only human beings close to that role are the IT department.
Like it or not there are legitimate reasons corps do this. HIPAA, SOC, PCI, good old fashioned responsibility, etc. Apple isn’t the only vendor that sells systems and hardware locked in this fashion.
The reason we’re talking about this and not anyone else:
1) Apple is one of the world’a most valuable companies.
2) There is a tiny but very loud minority of people who have a seething, irrational hatred of them and cannot ever acknowledge anything positive about them.
3) Their solution for this is actually implemented well and can’t be bypassed.
I understand your point but we’ve gotten here for valid reasons - “XYZ employee gets laptop with 100m SSNs stolen”, etc.
Speaking more broadly, you are aware that with Apple Silicon they had a massive opportunity to do as you say and “own” user hardware, right? It would have been trivial for them to utilize all of this to prevent alternate OS installation. Even if they did lock out alternate OS installation they’d lose what, 0.5% of sales from the people ranting about Apple on HN that were never really going to buy Apple anyway?
Yet here we are with Asahi Linux.
That's not the reason you're prevented from resetting the laptop.
I don’t understand. If you have open hardware that you have full control over, choose to lock it down to make it impossible to factory reset the device without a password, and then forget that password, how does having open hardware help?
If you say “there always should be a way to factory reset the device without a password” you are giving up a feature that Apple provides: making it less worthwhile to steal Apple devices.
A better problem, some may say, than having a thriving market for stolen laptops.
> Not a world I want to live in.
But a world many may prefer to the world with a thriving market for stolen laptops.
That's much more dangerous for the society than a few thieves making a buck.
I haven’t used Asahi yet but the way I understand it you can install Asahi right away and the hardware is forever yours to control.
And if you are worried about Apple one day remotely adding a lock to your Asahi laptop you can probably block those requests proactively on a network level anyways
Some may say that, because having their laptop stolen is a problem they actually experienced. Having your device remain owned by a vendor, who only "licenses" it for you to use opens up a whole new world of problems, some of which average person can't even imagine.
It is only thieves and ideologues who actually experience any difficulty. And while I’m all for righteous purity, I am also happy knowing that the thief who stole my MacBook from Spaces coworking in San Jose (do not ever use Spaces!) will get nothing for the risk they took, and/or that a buyer taking a too good to be true deal will get a brick.
Yes, I like this world better than the free-open-insecure alternative.
That might be a minor consolation, but the bigger point is that this will (hopefully) significantly disrupt the market for shady used MacBook sales and thus the incentive to target MacBooks for theft.
This is the government encryption backdoor all over again. There is no such thing as a security backdoor that can be used only by good guys. If Apple can’t determine someone is the legitimate owner of a locked device, they have two choices: allow thieves to unlock devices, resulting in more theft. Or decline to unlock for some legitimate owners who chose to lock their device and not take precautions.
It’s a tough choice, but I think Apple is making the right one here. You may disagree, and that’s fine.
Or should Apple just remove the activation lock feature, that was added specifically in response to large amounts of theft because we don’t think those thefts are going to happen any more?
He took down the details of it.
Actually, everyone experiences this right now. Macbooks are working like this. And 99% of people are fine with it. We don't have to imagine anything
That's not true. I think you're saying that Mac users are already today in an ecosystem where this could bite them hard, that much is true. But nobody gives it any thought until they personally find their multi-thousand dollar device useless and Apple refuses to help even though they totally could if they cared. Only then do they realize what a terrible situation it is.
Unless you lose the password to unlock the BIOS.
Which is not resettable via the (now very old) method of removing the CMOS battery or shorting a jumper on the motherboard for at least a decade.
(I had this issue on a HP Elitebook 8440p from 2011)
I don't see why, in principle, you couldn't have open hardware that provided the same capability to brick the device for unauthorised users. In which case you would be just as SOL if you forgot the credentials to that, too.
Either you have an activation lock like feature or you do not.
If your hardware has a path that allows a random person to circumvent it, then by definition it does not have an activation lock.
This isn’t an open vs closed hardware question. This “does this feature exist”, and your argument is that it should not. This is spite of the fact that activation lock was a feature introduced specifically in response to high rates of theft, and its introduction immediately reducing that theft.
Activation lock is a feature that people want, but again activation lock is either there or it is not. If your “open” hardware includes a mechanism that bypasses an ownership lock then by definition the lock is not a functional if feature.
A company can make an open laptop that has an activation system that requires an authentication in or to do a full device reset, or to replace the firmware. But if that lock is in place, it can’t let you flash a new firmware on or reset it, because again that defeats the purpose.
One could convincingly argue that dead accounts are e-waste.
The main reason I guess we don't say that is because we have expiration policies.
But if you lose access to your, say, facebook account with 100GiB of uploaded content, then that content is going to be sitting consuming at least 300GiB of media (replication, backups etc;).
Thus: is that a problem?
I see a device like this as an extension of my self, having it "open for all" is not desirable; I want to knowingly give it to someone.
If someone takes it, or I do not unlock it, then I don't want the possibility for it to unlock. I paid for it, it's mine, in perpetuity until I say otherwise, even if I'm dead: since as I mentioned it's an extension of me... it is dead too.
Funny misconception, that. You paid for it, but Apple controls it. You trust Apple to do the right thing, but you cannot prove that they do. You cannot hold them accountable for doing the right thing, either.
So, how can you trust it as an extension of your self? I understand your argument, but you've based it on a misconception if you think you're the ultimate user with the greatest authority over your device. Apple makes the rules, the only thing you do as a user is agree to play by them.
Unlocking a device by apple has no bad incentives associated, at the very worst case someone else can use your owned device without access to any of your data, aka stealing. And that assumes that apple will corruptly open it for someone else which they have zero interest in and that just accounts for regular old stealing with a billion dollar company’s help?
We just have to trust their implementation, which is conveniently proprietary and unaccountable.
> And that assumes that apple will corruptly open it for someone else which they have zero interest in
Are you sure about that? They very publicly gave the Chinese government control over Chinese iCloud data a few years ago. That, and they've been part of PRISM for the better half of a decade now. When a company has a working relationship with multiple sovereign governments, I'm not sure you can strongman the "Apple will save us" argument.
This is also a problem with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, 95% of cell carriers, most cable companies and your laptop manufacturer (regardless of company). Apple knows you feel insecure about this, so they market their products/services to you with this in mind. News flash: does anyone really think the largest company in America (let alone the world) isn't in kahoots with the American government? Microsoft was. Google was. IBM was. And Apple is bigger than them all.
Encryption is great. Mixing it with snake oil isn't. People are correct to call out Apple's failures to protect their users in this conversation, because their track record isn't very benevolent.
I also have to trust Debian, as I can’t audit millions of lines of code.
You really have no choice but to trust your OS vendor. If you don’t, find another vendor.
Apple doesn't have accountability. It's not that nobody wants to prove them right, it's that their system has been deliberately designed so that no one can.
I can prove it to a remarkable degree with the welcome email 3 days after this model was launched.
I didn't lose backup to account. I'd already migrated to the latest M1 MacBook, and my account is fine.
There's appears to me to be no backup to the firmware lock, there is a backup to FileVault, I have file vault.
I get it and am not complaining. But person above me said it wasn't a real problem.
My point is, it can be a $4500 problem for a legitimate purchaser.
This kind of security should be tied to something like removable storage device where the users data is stored, not the main device itself. That way when the owner dies or loses acess then said owner only loses acess to the data and not the entire device.
IMHO this is Apple trying to force people to purchase new devices and prevent reuse. It doesn't matter what is intended on the surface, but what the actual outcome is. This causes more waste and it's not helpful to the environment. If you are serious about protecting user data tie it to hardware security that can be decoupled from the device itself.
I'm in the business of repairing computers.Apple is setting bad precedence on multiple fronts, More than any other company in existence.
Assuming you know your Apple ID password, disabling Activation Lock takes less than 30 seconds. You can even do it remotely via Find My on the web.
It hasn't exactly curtailed the legitimate iPhone resale market in the ~seven years that it's been on by default, either, though it did produce a dramatic drop in people getting their phone snatched from their pocket[1].
1. https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-lea...
The number of people who manually set firmware passwords on their Mac (i.e. don’t have it set as the result of MDM) instead of just using FileVault these days must be vanishingly small.
I think that overrides any user set firmware password, so might allow you to recover it,
Just a thought maybe a little searching can validate it before you might try?
But most of us don't want to extend the courtesy to petty criminals.
Even though at any point said device can be unlocked, transferred, sold etc.
Given Apple's staggering pile of cash, I think that we'll have decades of warning if they're going to stop existing.
It is to stop devices being stolen, wiped and re-sold. It is an attempt to allow the legal owner of the device the ability to control who can use it, rather than the possessor of the device having full control who can use it.
Its only purpose is to protect the use of the device by people removing all the software (erasing back to factory defaults) and taking control of the physical device that way.
They refused acknowledgement of the credit card because they say it could’ve been stolen and they refused state ID as it could’ve been stolen or forged. They refused acknowledgement of documentation from the police. They said it was my folks fault for putting the boot lock on as it warns you, but my folks weren’t the ones who did that. I didn’t even know that boot lock existed until then. This experience was in the same original Apple store my folks purchased the computer, which is why I presumed state ID and original credit card would’ve been adequate.
Unfortunately my folks had made themselves indistinguishable from foreign intelligence. The amusing thing is that if they're so worried about forged government ID's and stolen credit cards, then how on earth can they trust a receipt? Unlike a government ID, your face isn't on it.
They literally can, but are choosing not to. If there is concern about stolen devices, then there could be a way for victims of theft to submit such information to apple and then when someone wants to purchase a used laptop they could check whether it's stolen. They could also provide a mechanism by which a laptop could be submitted for unlocking and sits in the request queue for three months pending someone saying "that's mine!"
At the end of the day it's bullshit that functional laptops are going into the trash stream for artificial reasons. There should be a tax of 10x the highest global retail price of the device assessed against the manufacturer.