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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

This control severely limits the utility of stolen iPhones, which is a good thing for me as an iPhone owner.

There are other phones that consumers can choose that don’t have this pairing. But this pairing of parts is one of the reasons people choose and iPhone.

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if this was their only intention they would let third party repair shops access to genuine parts or software tools. the reality is that third party "apple certified" repair shops are contractually less capable than uncertified ones, so much so that calling their service repair feels too generous.

apple do this to sell you phones instead of phone parts. if any of what you're saying was true it's simply a happy accident.

> happy accident

That’s a perfect term for this. I would absolutely believe that Apple approached this from that exact anti-theft perspective but it sure is easy to see how such a feature might benefit their bottom line. It’s a matter of looking around and wondering where the inexpensive parts are.

Giving third party shops official parts would still preclude the ability to enforce anti-theft unless you also gave them the software to pair it, and then you’ve once again precluded any ability to enforce anti-theft.

Apple needs to know what hardware is going into a particular phone to implement the killswitches, which means it can’t be handled as bulk inventory. They will sell you hardware that has been paired to a specific phone, but they’re not going to not have pairing (which is legally mandated for anti theft, over the objections of hardware vendors at the time) and they’re not going to hand out the ability to bypass the anti theft by signing your own keys.

Could they come up with some license-based model where the cpu wants to see apple attestation that the part is not stolen etc, perhaps, but, it’s not a trivial problem either.

> apple do this to sell you phones instead of phone parts. if any of what you're saying was true it's simply a happy accident.

Apple literally will sell you the parts though. How does that fit into your supposed “plot to force you to buy whole phones instead of parts”?

People are silly. About apple and nvidia and a couple of other companies in particular - there is a real thing with negative parasocial attachment to these brands, people love to hate them.

http://paulgraham.com/fh.html

Why doesn't apple allow the owner to choose to decouple the pairing?

It's telling why they dont.

Because thieves know that all iPhones are locked like this and thus don’t steal them.

If they knew that some significant percentage were not locked they would be worth stealing again, and if it’s locked they just throw it in a dumpster.

The fact that your phone is locked protects everyone else as well.

Somehow I doubt even a percent of owners would choose to unpair. And if they do for repair purposes, there's no reason they couldn't re pair/register. What am I missing?

Nothing, the argument for pairing the parts is so weak that I’m genuinely surprised to see it here on HN so often.

There have been reports of thieves threatening victims with weapons and demanding they disable icloud. Not saying that negates the benefit necessarily but it's a relevant data point.

> thieves know that all iPhones are locked like this and thus don’t steal them

Do you even believe this? I haven't seen any examples of thieves saying "stick em up! Oh, iPhone? Have a nice day"

Easy counterexample:

> an entire wall of iPhones (approximately 436) were gone

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/04/07/apple-...

But those were brand new iPhones, not activated, and therefore not locked...

...and Apple presumably have the IMEIs.

Another easy example:

> In the UK in 2016, there were almost half a million mobile phones stolen [...] _most of them iPhones_

https://www.trustonic.com/opinion/smartphone-crime-turning-t...

> Comparing data in the six months before and after Apple released its anti-theft feature, police said iPhone robberies in San Francisco dropped 38 percent. In London, they fell 24 percent.

> In New York City, robberies (which typically involve a threat of violence) of Apple products dropped 19 percent and grand larcenies of Apple products dropped 29 percent in the first five months of 2014, compared with the same time period from 2013, according to a report from the New York attorney general’s office, which included data from the New York City Police Department. By comparison, thefts of Samsung products increased 51 percent in the first five months of 2014, compared with the same period a year ago, the report said.

https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/1...

2014 would be prior to most of the features mentioned in this article (parts pairing) and not the subject of your article (kill switches). The article does tell us that:

* iPhones are very commonly stolen

* Android devices introduced a similar kill switch in 2014

> Samsung introduced to kill switch for its Galaxy S5 in April, so it will be sometime until its effects can be evaluated

I think you mean user.

You don't really own it in any meaningful way. (wish I could find out what my apps are doing - what network connections they make, how often they start up and under what conditions)

No one ever stole my phone, but I had everything from broken displays to dead batteries, so at least in my case this is not good for me as a owner.

Textbook confounded reasoning: it’s possible no one stole your phone _because_ they’ve been made such undesirable targets for theft.

These "locks" might reduce theft, but not only they still happen, but you can also make money with a stolen phone. You can sell it for parts. An iPhone will annoy you about the replaced display, but the phone still works. You can transfer the old battery's controller to the new one so the phone doesn't know about the change. You can sell the shell of the phone, speakers, cameras, etc.

Maybe now I benefit from these Apple restrictions and annoyances, but I've been using expensive phones since before Apple started doing this and yet my phone was never stolen. I've cracked a few displays and killed a few batteries though.

What seems to help me is having some awareness of my surroundings. I live in a big city and every day I see people standing by the road waiting for a bus. Phones out, noise cancelling headphones, bikes passing right in from of them... I mean, it's not that hard for a snatcher to take their phone.

How often does phone theft actually happen? I keep hearing this argument but in my ~15 years of owning non-apple phones and laptops, I've never had one stolen, or heard of anyone getting theirs stolen. Have I just been very lucky?

The answer depends on the country or even the city you live in or visit. In some places walking around with a $1000 phone is extremely dangerous to your life.

That seems surprising to me, when surely there's no easy way to steal a phone (iPhone or Android) and not have it completely locked and unusable. I would imagine that cars are eminently more desirable a target to steal as they're often left unattended for hours/days at the side of the road and they're typically worth far more than $1k. It's also relatively easy to attack a car waiting at traffic lights, over-power the driver and have access to the car and the keys, if the actual vehicle is required rather than just selling the parts.

Pickpocketing is quick and easy, sometimes not even a crime, and even though phones are locked, you can sell the Android phone for pieces. That's not the case for the iphone.

> Pickpocketing is quick and easy, sometimes not even a crime

I find that difficult to believe.

In many places, it's a crime according to the law, but if nothing happens with thieves or reported theft, then in terms of consequences it's not a crime.

I think you're using a different defintion of "crime" than I am (unlawful activity is probably the simplest). "Unenforced" would be probably a better term. e.g. Speeding in a car is a crime in a lot of places, but is often unenforced.

> That's not the case for the iphone.

You can definitely re-use or sell iPhone parts. Most of replacement parts shops have access to are not sold directly by Apple.

As mentioned in the article, some parts won't work and others will show warnings. And sometimes you can reprogram chips with small devices easily available from China, which essentially defeats Apple's hardware pairing.

I’m in Dublin, Ireland. It is not common, but not uncommon. Kids and teenagers zip around high-footfall areas in the city centre (such as our financial district) on escooters and electric bikes, and literally grab the phones out of your hand as you’re using them. Minimal violence because they know they’d likely lose, but still pretty traumatic and the Gardaí (our police force) are two swamped in everything else to do a thing about it.

I know four people it’s happened to in two years, all four of them women.

> escooters and electric bikes, and literally grab the phones out of your hand

London has a non-zero problem with this too - someone tried to grab mine earlier this year but they missed (and apologised as they rode off!) (and I had it on a strap anyway.)

My gf at the time had her phone stolen 2 years ago. Thought she forgot it at a cafe but after watching cctv someone took it out of her jacket like in a movie. Some coffeeshop employees will have their phones charging behind the counter but within customer reach and sometimes people steal the phones (happened to a close friend).

My friend got an apple laptop stolen.

Only friend that got a phone or computer stolen that I know of.

> but in my ~15 years of owning non-apple phones and laptops

> I've never had one stolen

> Have I just been very lucky?

No you’re not lucky. Your items aren’t worth stealing. Rarely does anyone steal android devices, or windows laptops the resale value isn’t there. Which should be obvious to the most casual observer.

Are you suggesting that a thief won't snatch your +$1k Galaxy S23 Ultra because they'll only get $700 instead of $900 for a similarly priced iPhone?

I'm not sure if they're that picky.

I don’t see looters breaking into a Samsung store.

The value is there, but if they're too dumb to loot an Apple store to steal iPhones that will be blocked pretty quickly and don't even run regular software, then maybe we shouldn't expect them to understand the value of phones from other brands either.

I'd expect the HN crowd to be a bit smarter than Apple store looters though.

It limits the utility of all iphones, stolen or not. It's not like you have a switch to deactivate it for yourself.

And for the consumer choice, I don't see Apple making any advertising about how anti repair they are, strange. I doubt most phone owners know about the pairing issues.

This control severely limits the utility of non-stolen iPhones which is not a good thing for an iPhone owner.

There are other phones that consumers can choose that don’t have this pairing. But this pairing of parts is *not* one of the reasons people chose an iPhone because most buyers were oblivious to it since Apple never told them.

Theft is a boogeyman that allows Apple absolute control over their devices. Why is theft Apple's problem rather than law enforcement? Should cars require a password too? Why don't we make all consumer goods require a password so that theft can be a thing of the past!

Law enforcement (and prosecutors) are increasingly unconcerned with theft of “small” amounts, and theft by groups of people they’ve decided to stop prosecuting.

I’m happy that Apple isn’t just saying “meh, not our problem”, and it’s one reason I buy their stuff.

In theory that sounds great, in practice you can find Facebook groups for ~stolen~ ahem lost iPhones for sale. The value of a bricked phone is never zero, so theft prevention isn’t as good as Apple claims.

This is such an absurd excuse. The competing android devices are not exactly known for being a more popular target for theft.

This is just a copout pushed by Apple to justify obviously bad practices, and due to their reality distortion field, you guys eat it up.

> The competing android devices are not exactly known for being a more popular target for theft.

Do you have a source? And which exactly competing android devices do you mean? Does the comparison factor in the popularity of the device?

There isn't a specific survey I can find pointing either way, which similarly makes the argument that theft is significant enough to justify restrictive and wasteful locks also moot.

By competing devices of course I am referring to other flagships which are of a similar price and feature set, like flagship Samsung phones etc.

>The competing android devices are not exactly known for being a more popular target for theft.

You're so close to getting it.

That’s just because the thieves don’t consider the android devices worth stealing.

London sadly has an ongoing problem with phone snatchers and pickpockets, so on two occasions I’ve seen them nick an Android. In the first case, they just chucked it on the floor a few metres further down the road. On the second, the guy loudly shouted “what the fuck is this shit?” as he cycled down the road and threw it into a canal.

I’m not quite sure what they expect if they snatch an Apple device? It’d just turn into a brick in a few minutes/hours?

So one of two things usually happen, either:

(1) It gets shipped straight to Eastern Europe or China and broken down for parts which are resold back to unauthorised repair shops in the West as official Apple parts.

Or more commonly (2) they will try to socially engineer the owner into giving up their Apple credentials so that they can sign out the iPhone and wipe it. If that fails, go to (1).

When my brother’s partner had her iPhone nicked, they extracted her phone number off the SIM then started sending her messages linking to a phishing iCloud sign in page, saying something like “Your stolen device has been located, sign in here to recover it.”.

The proper comparison is not with Android phones, it’s with iPhones before Apple introduced this feature. The news reported a global drop in iPhone thefts at the time [1].

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/1...

I disagree that the point of comparison should be iPhones from before this functionality, the point is that the negative effects of locking all parts are not worth the amount of theft, not that they don't reduce theft.

After all, you could massively reduce burglaries too by allowing home security systems to have automated lethal turrets to shoot burglars, but that's considered way too far in terms of social cost by pretty much every place.

The point of my reply was to illustrate the true effect on iPhone theft from this change. Do you have a more accurate way to measure that?

Whether you think the tradeoff is worth it or not is beside the point. I made no claim for or against the tradeoff, so you have nothing to disagree with there.

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