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Comment by trinsic2 | Hacker News Reader

Activation Lock creates undue friction during the ownership transfer.

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.

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> IMHO this is Apple trying to force people to purchase new devices and prevent reuse.

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...

Removing it from FindMy definitely doesn't solve firmware.

I wouldn’t expect it to, since Activation Lock is tied to an Apple ID and the firmware password is local.

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.

Just an idea, but, I remember something about T2 macs, and the find my integration and if you put the device into “lost mode” on the web, it sets a (numeric) firmware password as part of the ‘mark as lost’ process.

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?

That defeats the entire purpose of the feature. I want my computer to be unusable if stolen.

It's my understanding that the purpose is to protect data. It has a secondary effect of preventing use of the device. The goal of reuse and preventing device use are incompatible.

Activation Lock started on iPhones and the purpose was to discourage theft, as people were having them ripped out of their hands and then sold on.

Everyone supports the concept of reuse.

But most of us don't want to extend the courtesy to petty criminals.

I think this is shortsighted. Criminals might be the target of this policy today, but when these machines are no longer current, the owners of the machines might no longer know or care where the device is, and they will still be unusable. This to me is unacceptable.

So how many thefts, home break-ins, violent assaults etc should we tolerate so that in decades to come the devices can still be usable.

Even though at any point said device can be unlocked, transferred, sold etc.

As long as the owner can still log in to their iCloud account they can deregister their device. This is a non-issue.

I think its wrong to be dismissive of how inacessible this could become if apple is no longer a company

For almost any other company, I think this would be a reasonable concern.

Given Apple's staggering pile of cash, I think that we'll have decades of warning if they're going to stop existing.

This is really an issue of control. A company that designs and sells computers, which creates a conflict of interest, should not be in the business of controlling access to a computer. That should be handled by the customer. Otherwise they will use the market position to dictate how that control is used. It's a lose across the board, you are not thinking long term.

No, it’s even in the name of the feature. Activation Lock.

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.

Activation lock is not the same thing as file system encryption.

I’d rather not make my belongings such valuable targets for theft

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