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.
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.
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.