Does anyone know what happens next? I assume Apple has a plan for stolen stuff, knows all the taken serial numbers, and those devices aren’t going to be much good to anyone?
They sell the devices to people who have no reason to suspect they've been stolen, but the devices are deactivated by Apple and they won't work. Thieves get their money, ordinary people get the shaft. Just like regular capitalism.
yea i'm fairly certain activation lock would prevent the phones from working, one interesting fact is that they can disable accessories based off the serial number, iphones won't connect to an accessory if apple identifies it as banned which is the meaning behind those "accessory not compatible" messages. this happened a while back when apple bricked all those 2-in-1 lightning passthrough + headphone jack adapters overnight with a software update, but even if they could i doubt they'd do it to their own cables.