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There is a lot of media coverage explaining how iPhone tracking shows how stolen iPhones go to faraway countries that don’t block the imsi or china where they are stripped for parts.

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While this is true, it considerably reduces the value and hence incentive to steal them. I have no idea what the numbers are, but between the aggregation, shipping, stripping, etc, I would expect that you can only recover a small fraction of what you could get for a full phone otherwise.

You'd be surprised at how good the small hands in Shenzhen are at recovering all the tedious chips while being paid pennies.

Generally, if we could do what Shenzhen could do in the West, we could. But we cannot compete, as they have various advantages (physical, economical).

I'm not sure if I would count a lack of human rights, de facto labor slavery, etc as an advantage. Grinding people's lives into dust can give them an economic advantage, but it's not the kind of world we want to live in.

We agree on that, I was not trying to market communism as better. The point is that countries such as China get away with this behavior. For human rights and happiness it is a disadvantage, for the powers that be in China, an advantage.

Yeah that's true, agreed.

how does that circumvent the need for the former password to restore the phone?

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