Are all these macs stolen? Why aren't resellers requiring users to change/disclose their passwords or wipe the machine themselves before accepting the unit?
Yeah, this sounds 100% like "working as intended". Even if they aren't stolen, this prevents people who've gotten their hands on these laptops for free/cheap (recycling) don't also get their hands on an unassuming user's data. I'd rather that my data is protected than someone make a quick buck from my refuse (or worse, by stealing from me).
For legitimate transactions or ones where the data liabilities are fully disclosed, you can obviously get around this easily.
When my son's school locker room was burglarized, they didn't bother with iPhones and took higher-end Android devices only. It's precisely the second order effect you want as a user.
It's more than data. Apple's disk encryption already does that on iOS.
Activation lock isn't just data protection: It is Anti-theft. The concept was that bricking the hardware if it is stolen would reduce the, at the time, massive rise of theft. Activation lock on iOS (and all kinds of keying hardware to that board) basically shut down cell phone theft as they become worthless. They added the same to MacOS.
Yeah, I haven't heard of someone having their iPhone stolen since about 2015. Killing the illegal resale market with "if you don't know the password, the phone is a brick" is probably the biggest reduction in crime that society has ever experienced.
> Yeah, I haven't heard of someone having their iPhone stolen since about 2015
You haven't been paying attention then. In London, phone snatching (iPhones preferred) has been and remains an epidemic to the tune of tens of thousands a year - in a single city.
They might not be resold at full price, but even selling to a fence for parts is profitable if your acquisition cost is zero.
> They might not be resold at full price, but even selling to a fence for parts is profitable if your acquisition cost is zero.
Apple has started blacklisting parts associated with locked iPhones. At this point the only reusable bit is the case and possibly battery. The display, Face ID, Touch sensor, and such are all bricked. Overall the reduction is massive in any form. There isn't a 100% effective solution but you can easily cut down on 90%.
What parts? The screen / front camera assembly also stays locked if the phone it was on was stolen. The FaceID / TouchID data is stored on the camera module.
And now we're into John Deere levels of "fuck you, pay me" whenever anything breaks.
No thanks. The secondary repair market is extremely important to keep on life support.
If you cede all repair work to manufacturer blessed shops the amount of waste and expense skyrockets.
I want patched together laptops working 12 years from now, just like I have old T-series laptops from back in the day with various replacement parts humming away right now in my homelab. It's silly to just toss everything in the trash the moment is breaks.
At component level, yeah no impossible but for general resale it wouldn't be too hard. I'm pretty sure the Face ID and Touch ID modules already do this.
You would need to add some general identifiers to parts with a GUID and at production/official repair time, register those parts to an iPhone S/N. If Activation locked, those parts would need to not be able to be registered to another iphone until the original device is unlocked, thus clearing those parts.
Look - I get that it's probably not too hard to do with most of the parts that contain active electronics, but the comment I was replying to said all the parts.
How are you going to lock down the phone body? Or the screen (not including the digitizer)? Which, coincidentally, are probably the 2 most damaged parts of a phone.
I suppose there's probably some way Apple could lock them down. But that seems like an expense wildly out of proportion to the potential benefit.
My family has still gotten their phone stolen (albeit when abroad). Anti-theft is the reason I'm happy to support Apple's practices that make it harder to swap generic components between phones. I'd rather no components be swappable without Apple intervention.
The legal owner and the person whose account is on the device may not necessarily be the same person. Especially in situations with smaller companies without device management, or e-waste recycling
The legal owner is the only entity that gets to decide if the device should be sold or not.
A person who is temporarily assigned the use of a company machine will not be able to prevent the legal owner of the machine from turning off activation lock.
If that's the case then I guess it wouldn't be too much work for Apple to provide a way to contact the original owner and ask them if they would mind it being wiped and reactivated for recycling.
I'm sure some percentage of owners would allow that if it was just a click of a button and would help cut down on e-waste. As long as the machine isn't stolen and you know you're not going to expose any data then why not?
(...and if it is stolen then the owner can expect the recycler to explain where they got it from and return it.)
I wondered how to phrase this and I think I’ve done a bad job based on the downvotes.
I don’t mean that Apple allow a third party to contact anyone directly, I agree that that would be terrible.
Instead I could see Apple themselves contacting the last known owner to ask permission to wipe and open the laptop for reuse.
If that’s not what you want then you tell Apple the once and that’s the end of it.
Reuse won’t always be what people want but if a laptop can be repaired and securely reused then that’s much, much more energy efficient than recycling it.
allowing this would open the possibility of thefts forcing the victims to respond in a specific way thus opening a possibility of violence along with theft.
so no to that. the solution to work as deterrent should be final: stolen device = brick device, no other possibility.
in the case of solving theft of devices we have to choose the price we want to pay. all solutions are based on various ways to deter the theft. there is no solution to stop the action of theft once started. thus all solutions have a price that could range from false positives (like legit owners being locked out) to waste like theft happens because they dont know that they cannot unlock it without destroying the device.
You can already do that on Find my Mac by locking the phone/laptop remotely. Same way as you would when your credit card is stolen; a couple of clicks and no one else can use it.
No, Apple cannot unlock the machine and that is the point. No government can compel Apple to decrypt anything. If you trade in an old device with Apple they provide detailed instructions more then once on unlocking and wiping before shipping. If you do not follow them, you do not get your trade in credit.
Apple can remove activation lock, which is the context of "unlock" here. The person you replied to is not talking about decrypting the contents of the laptop.
However, Apple chooses not to do this unless they can establish that it is actually your device. Giving trade-in credit for activation locked devices would effectively be giving thieves an easy way to make money off of these otherwise useless devices, so they don't do that to avoid incentivizing theft.
It would be cool if Apple offered a program where these activation locked devices could be returned to Apple for free. Apple could contact the last known owner and let them know their device has been recovered. If Apple doesn't hear back from them, then they could wipe the device and sell it as refurbished, or recycle it (depending on how damaged it is). This avoids creating an incentive for thieves to steal, but also overcomes the e-waste argument.
The article claims that the issue is schools and businesses jettisoning these devices in bulk and not wanting to go to the effort of resetting them properly.
It seems dubious to me. Shouldn’t the reseller withhold payment until the device is verified to be usable? And shouldn’t schools and businesses be incentivized to reset the devices since they want the full resale value?
I might be wrong but I believe Apple can unlock these machines with proof of purchase. At least I remember carrying a non MDM enrolled device from a departed employee to Apple in the past to have the activation lock removed and all I needed was a receipt and patience.
The company I work for has to do it from time to time with Apple's help. We have Mac users who, for example, return locked Macs when leaving the company... we unlock them then with Apple's help.
There are actually a few ways around iCloud lock, they all aren't great for thieves:
1. An insider (hard to get)
2. Phishing the owner (your device has been found, just sign into your Apple ID on this specific login form...)
3. Physically going to an Apple Store, with faked proof of purchase, and ideally a convincing disguise
4. Resell to some Chinese reseller (particularly because China doesn't use the same IMEI blocklist as the rest of the world), and take whatever they give you, and then it's not your problem anymore
Option #3 is surprisingly popular for petty criminals.
I mean the article says that they "assume they have been destroyed" so maybe it's businesses paying for hardware to be destroyed and now it's not possible to resell instead.
Back in my day, when we returned school supplies our teachers made us erase the markings we made so they could be reused, or else we had to pay the replacement cost. That was a lot more work than wiping a hard drive.
That’s exactly the point. If you properly wipe it, it’ll get the activation lock removed. Either resellers are doing things wrong, or these devices are being stolen and offloaded cheap. This isn’t exactly a new problem either, it was a problem with enterprise windows devices and locked bootloaders too, this is just harder/“impossible” to bypass.
It's a bummer, I could have keep using it as a media platform or a plain functional laptop without root if I had knew that before hand.
I had my account on this. I formatted and that when I saw that I will not be able to re-install anything that I realized I bricked a perfectly fine machine.
This. Activation Lock is an Anti-Theft, not a privacy mesure.
By making stolen hardware a brick, it reduces the upside to a thief to pennies on the dollar. This makes the legal risk not worth it. Thus: massive drops in theft. https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-lea...
They tend to call themselves recyclers in the trade not resellers. They buy crates of these and play the probability game. They make more money on making frankenlaptops than actually stripping and recycling them. In fact most of them don't even recycle stuff themselves and subcontract that out periodically to other companies that actually do it.
They are getting pissy because Apple trashed their probability game.
I left my job at a publicly traded company you've heard of in the summer, seeing layoffs on the horizon (i was right!). The company has never responded to my request for a shipping label to return the macbook they bought for me. But it was remotely disabled, and now is impossible to get into. I'd happily factory reset it and give it to my nephew or something but I can't get it. So, I've asked a few times, emailing the IT contacts I have there, because I want to get rid of the damn thing. No response. But I can't legally sell it since it's not mine, and Apple will likely not bypass the firmware password for me. What am I supposed to do with this thing (besides pay my own freight to ship it back to the company I guess, something I refuse to do out of spite). Anyway, I can see how a lot of laptops might end up in the dust bin because of things like this.
>”Often the previous owners are corporations or schools who buy and sell the machines in bulk and aren't interested in helping recyclers or refurbishers unlock them.”
A lot of these units have small issues that would prevent unlocking. Like a keyboard issue or an LCD issue. Guaranteed to end up in the trash under this setup.
No, companies and businesses go bankrupt, and often dump items at the last minute to recoup losses. Other times, IT departments are given bad info and devices are not owned by the user they were told, and other times the owner is simply too dumb or lazy to unlock themselves.
hardly justifies turning working technology into a brick
Users, particularly those not absorbed into the Apple ecosystem, don't keep their iCloud account in high regard and by the time they're getting rid of their computer, have long ago forgotten the password. Additionally, they don't realise there are special steps required before handing off these computers.
Not necessarily stolen, people just don't know better. The article explains that companies/schools operate in bulk, meaning they just drop thousands of in bulk - so they dont care if the are locked or not.
