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Comment by notanormalnerd | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why iFixit doesn't even touch on that point.

I live in Barcelona and phones are being pickpocketed every day here. Not being able to wipe or unlock or else is a mayor deterrent for the pickpockets, because noone will take the phone off of them, so it's not worth it. Phones are still being stolen but imagine if they could sell to a global market of repair shops.

You couldn't go to any tourist location without having your phone stolen if it wasn't bolted to your person.

I get the iFixit point as well but if I have a 1500€ phone, I don't want to think about it being stolen, when I am on vacation, because someone needs some parts (oh the human trafficing/organ harvesting similarity...)

Apple should offer a better repair program and offer the ability to "unlock and relock" it in a apple store with proper proof of ownership. Or anything else in that direction.

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> I get the iFixit point as well but if I have a 1500€ phone, I don't want to think about it being stolen, when I am on vacation, because someone needs some parts (oh the human trafficing/organ harvesting similarity...)

Do you think thieves are that descending? I know someone whos iPhone 14 was stolen in London. If this helped protect against theft, then why did they steal the phone anyway?

Of course thieves are discerning. They are running a profitable criminal enterprise. They are in it for big money and are extremely sophisticated and not going to risk stealing worthless junk.

An example of one theft is not evidence that the policy doesn’t reduce theft, or that the purpose of the policy isn’t to reduce theft.

> Of course thieves are discerning. They are running a profitable criminal enterprise.

I can promise you the person who stole this iPhone doesn't run a profitable criminal enterprise. But I am also not disputing that someone along the theft value chain, someone will likely be discerning. However, your claim seems to conflate a criminal enterprise and the theft value chain with an individual thief.

Also, I find the notion that it is very risky to steal something in London hard to believe, but if you have some data to back that up I would be happy to change my mind.

I’m highly dubious of anyone claiming this reduces crime.

Things being easy to steal and sell aren’t the _cause_ of crime, they’re a symptom. If someone has felt the need to resort to a life of crime for whatever reason, how is lowering their “salary” (so to speak) going to reduce crime? Surely they now need to steal more phones to make up the difference? I guess you could argue they might commit a different crime instead?

It’s not that it reduces crime overall, it’s that it reduces a specific, very inconvenient crime to be the victim of. Having your phone stolen, especially on vacation, is significantly worse than many other sorts of theft.

And yet people still have their iPhone 14s stolen while on holiday.

And people still die of infection despite the existence of antibiotics. Crazy, right?

Please tell me you understand that reducing the value of an iPhone on the black market will reduce incidence of theft even if it doesn’t eliminate it entirely.

Few people would choose a life of crime as a hobby, or if it wasn't paying much better than an average entry-level office job, so it's not like someone decides to resort to crime and then later considers the financial aspects. Most get into it because of the quick money.

To use a hyperbolic example, if the median profit for stealing a phone would suddenly drop to $10, where their only value are the easily extractable raw materials, a 20-fold increase in theft would be less likely then a rapid drop in theft.

Currently there are avenues to remove iCloud lock, where licensed repair shops or Apple employees remove them for some extra cash [1], so the value of stolen iPhones is greater than the raw materials, making it attractive. But with higher regulation, that could change.

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmygb/checkm8-info-remove-i...

https://www.imore.com/iphone-theft-drops-40-san-francisco-25...

Activation lock made a huge difference. The next step to talking profits out of stolen iPhones is to make harvesting parts difficult.

I absolutely give Apple the benefit of the doubt when it comes to I this. Back in the bad old days iPhone theft was incredibly common and that has come down a lot over the years.

> The next step to talking profits out of stolen iPhones is to make harvesting parts difficult.

I would 100% buy this if you showed me data that indicates that part harvesting is behind most of the remaining theft of iPhones, which it very well may be, but if we have the data we would not have to guess.

I’m buying this right now, this is how a lot of car theft works also - parts are a good source of cash.

Especially catalytic converters. Can be stolen from an unprotected (i.e. no massive baseplate) car in below 30 seconds, and nets you about 1000$ a piece from junkyards willing to ignore the sawzall marks.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/watch-catalytic-converte...

FFS, what else do you think people are stealing them for? To make abstract art? Kleptomania? To stop the 5G towers from giving them COVID?

People steal stuff because they can use it or because they can turn around and sell it. If they can’t do either, they eventually stop stealing those things.

Maybe people resort to a life of crime because it makes them money and they like money, not because they have no other option. People readily accept that rich people do morally wrong things (like exploit their employees etc) for more money. So why assume that the only reason people in general would do morally wrong things is because they need to to feed their family?

> So why assume that the only reason people in general would do morally wrong things is because they need to to feed their family?

I don't think anyone has ever made that claim, but people do tend to do what's easy/convenient and it's a lot easier and more convenient to put in 8 hours in a safe climate-controlled office where you get medical benefits and a salary you can depend on than it is to go out every night mugging people or trying to pick pockets, then trying to figure out how to sell your stolen goods, all without getting killed, robbed yourself, or caught by police.

Most people need to make money somehow and nobody is picking the most dangerous, risky, effort intensive means to make that money when they have other options readily available.

The harder it is for someone to make money doing anything other than commit crimes the more likely they will be to commit crime and for some people (those with few resources, and addictions and/or past criminal records for example) it can be very very hard to get and maintain legitimate employment.

Because most pickpockets and phone thieves probably aren’t making the equivalent of an office salary.

Most of the people in that line of work wouldn't be able to get and hold an office job.

That’s kind of the point.

> Surely they now need to steal more phones to make up the difference?

Not necessarily. If they can't make enough money from stealing iPhones, they may quit and go into management.

>If this helped protect against theft, then why did they steal the phone anyway?

They are plenty of stories on Reddit and TikTok where the stolen phone ends up in China, and then the owner is phished into disabling iCloud so that the phone could be wiped. If not the sold is phone for parts. To me the very fact that you need an entire phishing ring to make stealing iPhones profitable means that there is some cost that deters thieves from targeting iPhones.

Barring phishing, the next best thing is to scrap it for parts. I can see Apple's reasoning here - if most of your growth is going to come from poorer nations it makes sense you don't your customer base worry about carrying a year's salary in their pocket.

I'm also unconvinced it's a "money grab" on Apple's part. Locking down repairs will not come anywhere close to replacing the lost revenue from the consumer's slowing upgrade cycle.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/10zg2o7/how_a_typica...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/yoataa/ever_since_m...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/rwlznf/warning_stol...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/rwlznf/warning_stol...

How do the thieves get the contact details of the person whose phone they stole to fish them? And why did they steal the iPhone I mentioned without having the contact details of the person?

In the last link, the user explains in the comments that when they marked the device as stolen, they could choose some text to display on the screen and they chose to include a phone number that they had access to.

Plenty of people hope for a good samaritan interaction and will do something like that.

also idk if they ever changed it, but a long time ago I found a phone that was locked and no identifying information shown. I asked siri to call 'my' mother and she arranged a pickup.

If thieves have to rely on people seeing thieves as good Samaritans and trusting thieves with their contact details after they were robbed by them, we definitely have entered a realm of absurdity. But while this hypothetical realm is devoid of all reason and logic, theft still remains.

1. The Emergency card (the first user was contacted when the user's father's iphone was stolen).

2. You can read the phone number off the sim card

3. Many people upon losing their phone will set their phone to lost mode and include a number.

> 1. The Emergency card (the first user was contacted when the user's father's iphone was stolen).

Yet the father was the one being fished.

> 2. You can read the phone number off the sim card

How?

> 3. Many people upon losing their phone will set their phone to lost mode and include a number.

Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.

> Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.

Your phone could disappear and you would assume it fell out of your pocket or that you left it somewhere, when in fact someone could have stolen it from you while you were not paying attention.

And besides, most people probably don’t expect that a thief would respond and trick them into unlocking the phone for them. Instead the expectation might be that a thief would not respond, and that if someone responded they are a good samaritan trying to help you.

>Yet the father was the one being fished.

Not sure I understand. The father's phone was stolen, and the son was contacted, and the son logged into the account.

>How?

Anyone can pop out the sim card and plug it into any dumbphone, navigate to settings and read the phone number. I assume there's probably a USB device to dump data on a sim card.

>Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.

Your phone is lost until you attain the information that it was stolen. I fail to find it now, but there was a tiktok of a woman who lost their iphone at festival and it turned up in china where she also was unsuccessfully phished.

> How do the thieves get the contact details of the person whose phone they stole to fish them?

If the phone is set to display notifications when locked, you can see the usernames of friends of theirs in notifications on the screen.

I found a locked iPhone on the ferry one time and saw Snapchat notifications from their friends on the lockscreen. I sent a message request to one of the users on the notifications, and told them that I found the phone on the boat and that the owner of the phone should contact the ferry company to retrieve the phone as I would hand it over to the crew of the ferry.

Similarly, if your goal was to be a thief instead of being helpful you might keep an eye on the Instagram notifications of the phone, and then cross-reference friends of those people to figure out who owns the phone.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/05/re-victimization-from-po...

Granted, that's dealing with stolen iPhones getting sold and an entirely set of other problems. You'll note that 26.8% of them were either unlocked, easily guessable, or in one instance had the credentials there (compare shoulder surfing before stealing the phone).

> Of phones they won at auction (at an average of $18 per phone), the researchers found 49 had no PIN or passcode; they were able to guess an additional 11 of the PINs by using the top-40 most popular PIN or swipe patterns.

You can tell the theft thing is an excuse from Apple because they don't do things like allowing you to unlock parts you own, or even buy genuine new parts that definitely stolen without silly restrictions like needing to put in a serial number first and then contact Apple to pair it (this is probably done to make it almost useless for repair shops because they want to push their even more restrictive "independent" repair program)

>tell the theft thing is an excuse from Apple because they don't do things like allowing you to unlock parts you own

This would only make sense if Apple had an existing system for customers to unlock their own parts and then disabled it. The system you are talking about doesn't exist, and the idea that they built X but didn't include X+1 because of "greed reasons" isn't entirely credibly.

While you could argue that maybe someone brought the idea up and it was shot down by some devilish exec, it's equally likely to me that

(1) no one at apple thought of the idea

(2) since the product would be customer facing it is some apple design hell along with the iPad calculator

(3) no one cared enough to spend the political points to push for the product

(4) the problem just isn't prevalent enough to justify the cost.

There are plenty of reasons why Apple could be building this to reduce theft while also not building some other auxiliary system.

Something Louis Rossmann who advocates for right to repair, says (I'm paraphrasing of course) is that it's not necessarily that they explicitly go out of their way to say "let's make repair harder", but when there are no incentives to improve the situation it won't be worked on at all and that has the same effect, so it's still important to push them to do it

Its like poisenous plants. Being poisenous doesn't prevent the single plant from getting eaten. But it makes it very unlikely, that a lot plants of that species get eaten. So while a single iPhone might get stolen, overall there are less if many thieves targetting iPhones. They don't bring money, but increase the risk of landing in prison.

> So while a single iPhone might get stolen, overall there are less if many thieves targetting iPhones.

Do we have data to show this?

> They don't bring money, but increase the risk of landing in prison.

I also don't think the risk of going to prison for theft in London is that high. Sure, stealing an iPhone increases it, but an increasing an insignificant risk by a factor of 10 could still leave it being insignificant.

https://www.imore.com/iphone-theft-drops-40-san-francisco-25...

This article predates the technology being discussed, so it can't be data that shows that this technology is preventing crime.

There is probably a "trailing indicator" effect at play here. I believe people don't sell the phone immediately, but try and find a buyer later. It will take a few thefts of un-sellable iPhones before the thief realises that the risk is not worth the reward. These changes don't trickle down immediately.

> It will take a few thefts of un-sellable iPhones before the thief realises that the risk is not worth the reward.

But his only bears out if thieves can easily discern an iPhone 14 from other phones, which I'm not sure is that easy in the context they operate. And it also requires it to be risky to seal in London, and I think if that were the case then theft would be less prevalent there. And I think if the people in London cared about having their iPhones stolen, they would take political action to that effect.

But sure, it all sounds very plausible, though I would still like to see data to back it up. It may be, but it also may not be.

>I live in Barcelona and phones are being pickpocketed every day here. Not being able to wipe or unlock or else is a mayor deterrent for the pickpockets

Doesn't sound like it.

If they are being stolen it doesn't work.

If the whole part won't be used it will be stripped to components and resold to the same repair shops anyway. Yeah the profit margins will be smaller per phone but they will just steal more.

Apple doesn't want phones fixed because Apple wants to sell more phones, plain and simple. There is no other incentive.

> Yeah the profit margins will be smaller per phone but they will just steal more.

The risk of getting caught scales with that increased volume. The extra friction of parting out a phone for less money compared to selling the whole phone beggars belief that "stealing more" is the most common response.

"iPhone theft getting less profitable raises the rate of theft" just doesn't make sense.

> but they will just steal more

Yes, classically, thieves just scale up their operations tenfold when their profit per theft goes down. This is why iPhone theft has skyrocketed in the past decade, to the point where the general public is anxious to ever wield such a device in public for fear of being immediately snatched.

Oh, wait, that’s not what happened at all.

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