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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

What I find funny is that stuff in Seattle Coffee Gear was (presumably) untouched en route to the Apple Store, but the thieves could have made off with coffee machines and other equipment worth several thousand dollars a pop and zero remote locking mechanisms.

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The market for one is much more liquid than the other.

Nice pun

But if they stole the coffee machines, they’d be getting into a lot of hot water.

Plus they are clearly more into apple picking...than daily grinding...

Yeah but...those machines are huge and weigh a lot. Pound for pound, Apple gear is worth much more.

If they have the capability to tunnel underground and remove hundreds of pounds of dirt then surely they have the capability to transport an 80lb machine

They didn't do that. They just carved out some drywall between stores. You could do it in a couple minutes with $100 worth of tools (or a sledgehammer, if you wanna go low-tech). Pic: https://twitter.com/coffeemikeatkin/status/16432639396425236...

Those two stores are right in the middle of a long, open pathway. It’s a decent distance to the parking lot. Dragging huge espresso machines would certainly get someone’s attention. There’s truck patrols and foot patrol regularly walk along that pathway.

Don't they remotely lock stolen phones so they're largely useless?

The thief only needs to find a buyer who doesn't know this.

There's been a few writers where stolen phones have been tracked back to China where they are stripped into parts, with those parts then being sold on the grey market.

Most of the parts are not locked to the device, with a few exceptions.

> Pound for pound, Apple gear is worth much more.

Once upon a time I looked at my iPod and wondered how much space it would take if I spent an entire year's pay on iPods.

I worked it out and it was kind of depressing to realize that a year of my work would only buy about 1/3 ft^3 of iPods which would weigh under 50 pounds (9000 cm^3 and 23 kg).

What's the market for coffee machines? Probably far less than iPhones.

Coffee machines usually don't phone home and the good La Marzocco machines are worth as much as a new car. It's quite a liquid market. Furthermore parting them out is highly profitable as the replacement parts from the dealer operates almost like a mob, with some brands requiring replacement parts to be ordered or replaced through certified repairmen.

Plus, unlike a 13-year-old iPhone, a 13-year-old La Marzocco machine is worth something.

The market is large enough, there's plenty of coffee fanatics.

Can stolen coffee machines be remotely bricked?

Don't give them ideas. We already have offline DRM'd coffee machines.

Sure, but they would probably be easier to sell. You need a pretty good story to sell an iPhone new in box, but you could always claim to be a liquidator for a chapter 11 coffee shop and resell the machines.

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