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Comment by M4v3R | Hacker News Reader

I’ve heard that take many times, but is there any actual data to back this claim? I mean think about it - your average thief is not the kind of person that will know what part setialization is or how to tell iPhone models apart to know which ones to steal. They steal your purse, bag or just anything and sight and only then deal with the loot, discarding what’s useless. I would be very surprised if serializing the battery or screen is putting any significant dent in the number of stolen iPhones worldwide.

Apple has already created a pretty good deterrent to prevent iPhone theft - the Find My iPhone system. It’s better because it’s actually useful to the user and works even if you turn the phone off. The way I see it there’s absolutely no need to serialize the parts as an additional measure to prevent theft (given also what I said in the first paragraph)

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> I mean think about it - your average thief is not the kind of person that will know what part setialization is

It doesn't matter. The market will dictate behaviour. As soon as the value of iPhone parts drops at the end of the chain (Shenzhen et. al) this will propagate all the way up to the street criminals.

Perhaps they will not discriminate by iPhone submodel (will not matter after a while of the serialisation policy), but they will (and do) discriminate by brand.

Much smartphone theft includes robbers grabbing the phone out of unsuspecting victims' hands, forcing them to surrender it at gunpoint, or pickpocketing it.

I don’t know if there’s data to back this up. I’m simply assuming based on what I know. What I know comes from people I went to school with who have stolen phones before telling me at the pub. There is a price for the type of device you bring in. The ones on the bikes or mugging people actually drop it off to the people who send stuff off to China. Those people give a standard price for the type of phone, he quoted £100 for an iPhone 11 and £120 for a Samsung Galaxy.

He corroborates your point regarding not discriminating the phone he stole, to be fair.

Making the parts useless won't immediately stop theft, sure. It's the same with making catalytic converters hard/impossible to fence. People still steal them, because they're working off an older state of the world. But once you've stolen enough stuff that you couldn't market, you figure out not to steal that anymore. (Although if you're stealing bags, harvesting cash and throwing the bags in the river, phones in the bags are still gone)

Regarding your second point, I agree with the Find My praise, however Find My itself illustrates why every little thing done to make it “more of a ballache” to steal an iPhone, more costly for the thieves, is reducing the demand and these “papercuts” can add up in a sizeable way.

But your point is valid, and I can understand why you hold that opinion.

When this eventually makes it to “basically every iphone out there”, and thieves stop being able to go to the local repair shop to trade in the iphone they stole for a wad of cash, they will stop targeting people with iphones.

I take it you’ve never been to an impoverished area? Holding an iphone paints a massive target on your back.

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