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Comment by jasonjayr | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't this effectively kill 3rd party parts/repairs? Or salvaging dead phones for parts?

Is this gonna make more e-waste, or make repairs more expensive, or both?

You can salvage dead phones for parts. You can use the icloud web ui to unlink the phone. If you can't coordinate with the owner to unlink it, it does bring up the question of how you obtained the phone you are stripping for parts.

Some businesses just dump loads of devices into the arms of recyclers without offering any further help. If their IT team isn’t doing a proper Apple-sanctioned MDM-wipe then all those devices may still be activation locked. What can the recycler do with that? Just shred the devices.

Why would the ‘IT team’ refuse or ignore the legitimate recyclers after being informed they dumped ‘loads of devices’ with it still active?

The recyclers don’t have any way to contact the IT team?

The job for the IT department is to ensure all company data is wiped from the phones before dropping them off at the recyclers. Nothing more than that.

Heck, I bet some managers even knowingly ask them to keep the activation locks in place so that the phones will be shredded, just to add a belt-and-suspenders level of security.

Then that’s the decision of the IT team/management/etc… to intentionally destroy them? Which they have the right to since they presumably own the devices in the absolute sense.

What does that have to do with Apple’s procedures?

If activation locks didn’t exist then companies would have to pay the recyclers to shred the devices. Otherwise recyclers would actually be able to recycle them into usable parts/whole devices to sell.

Keeping that stuff off the used market has got to be a big side benefit for activation lock.

Huh? If they didn’t exist I imagine it would be the other way around. Recyclers would pay companies to have stuff sent to them, because they could actually sell the parts to the highest bidder.

But in either case if the IT department/management actually wants to destroy the devices, no procedures from Apple will affect that decision.

Worst case they just call a shredding truck to their doorstep to shred them right there.

But in either case if the IT department/management actually wants to destroy the devices, no procedures from Apple will affect that decision.

Either way, as it stands now it doesn’t cost the company anything to have the devices shredded. Without activation locks it will, either by forgoing the premium paid by the recyclers or by having to pay a shredder to do it for them.

It’s a power difference. Activation locks give companies more power to control what happens to devices after they’ve left their custody. It also makes it more likely for devices to get shredded because companies need to affirmatively consent to the devices being resold after leaving their custody. This benefits Apple by taking used devices off the market.

This affirmative consent element is also quite powerful in the consumer space for the same reason that opt-out organ donation is so successful: people generally prefer defaults and shy away from making extra decisions that complicate their lives. This means people are much more likely to trade in their old phones to Apple (who either shred or sell as refurbished) instead of selling on the open market.

How is this any of this relevant to the IT team deciding to send their old stuff to be destroyed, activation lock or not?

That happens constantly

Why would the IT team spend any time at all trying to help some 3rd party recycler make a few bucks on Ebay?

Because, if they don’t, then recyclers will stop accepting used phones from that company.

If "extending Activation Lock to other components" means what I think it does, then the phone's owner should have control over this and 3rd party repairs should be fine. It may cut out the market for unofficial parts, but does that even exist today? Is anyone making iphone compatible batteries with any scale? (I'm curious if so)

The thrust of this move devalues phones to thieves, which I generally think is a good thing. Cutting down the hardly salvageable value even further should help the "market" sort this out and lead to less theft. I like it.

Third party parts exist for tons of Apple devices. Usually of varying (typically poor, especially with batteries) quality. You can get OLED screens (actually oled!) that are replacements even. They pretty much will all give you the “unable to validate authentic component” message when paired with an iPhone … but that’s kind of working as intended there.

If they use lost or stolen parts, probably.

Why would a 3rd party part show up in a serial number database of stolen phones?

Sadly it won’t work even if you own two broken phones and want to make one out of them. Big loss to repairability and indeed a massive waste of resources. Today I was reading on HN a story on how degrowth won’t do anything for combating global warming. Oh well, this is exactly the opposite of that and it’ll cause a lot of problems for future generations. They’ll look back towards us with disgust and dissapointment.

If you buy a phone, add it to your iCloud account, then the phone becomes broken in a way you want to salvage the camera/battery, presumably removing that phone from your iCloud account (which I don't believe requires the phone to turn on?) would allow you to use those genuine, not-stolen parts in another repair.

>However, it aligns with Apple’s recent policy changes that allow repairs with genuine used parts while maintaining stringent security measures.

Doesn't this imply that so long as the phone is unliked from apple id, the parts can be re-paired (hah) with a new phone?

This is probably their real goal here.

Why would it do either of these things? It would kill the black market for stolen apple parts, but otherwise it shouldn’t impact anything else. Assuming you can “unpair” iCloud on dead phones (which you can do already, to my knowledge), then salvaging isn’t a problem.

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