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Comment by dgb23 | Hacker News Reader

What's the purpose of that other than making it harder to repair? Is there any good faith argument to made made here?

They will say "security", and unfortunately half of HN will gobble it up no-questions-asked.

The security argument can be achieved just as well by giving the user the master key (on a Yubikey-style HSM if needed) to unlock the protection.

The fact it's not done that way clearly shows the primary security they care about is that of Apple's bank account.

Security measure - otherwise someone can intercept your MacBook during delivery, replace the original component with a fake one that has a backdoor and ship it to you and you start using it completely oblivious to the fact it has been hacked.

That might be an argument to reject non-genuine components, but it's not an argument to reject genuine components just because they've previously been installed in a different device. (And even if it's possible to modify a genuine component to add backdoors, this still doesn't help, since they could just modify the one that came out of your MacBook too.)

It does remove any incentive for a thief to steal a Macbook. They can't strip it for parts and sell those parts if they won't work.

In theory people will steal Apple devices, then when they learn that digital locks make them impossible to use they will gut them for parts and sell those. Serial locking would defeat that. In practice, yes, it pretty much just exists to make them millions off of forced overpriced in-house repairs.

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