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What's interesting is that this sort of thing would only be useful in the looting context, best I can tell. Otherwise it's hard to know which devices specifical
by _bxg1 6y ago
What's interesting is that this sort of thing would only be useful in the looting context, best I can tell. Otherwise it's hard to know which devices specifically were stolen. So did they already have the system in place just for this kind of situation?
- dahdum 6y agoIt’s useful for any thefts from their store so they had it in place already. It’s not the first time they’ve dealt with smash and grabs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rvz 6y agoMost likely. Given that Apple has 'Find My iPhone' and now 'Find My' on all of its products it looks like they have it turned on by default once looted from a store and it phones home directly to both Apple and the Apple Store. Another point would be that devices that are looted / marked as stolen should phone itself home to Apple in the background rather than telling the thief, so that it would be harder for the thief to realise that they're being tracked.
- olliej 6y agoThere have been many smash and grab/ram raids of apple stores (it turns out giant windows aren't super robust against cars), so I assume this is essentially a devaluing step to reduce the reason to steal. I assume it leverages the same infrastructure as the activation lock system which caused a huge drop in phone thefts.
- tinus_hn 6y agoWhy would it be hard to know which devices were stolen? They’d know which display models they had that were no longer there right? You can’t buy the display models.
- parsimo2010 6y agoThis is easy for Apple to do since every iPhone is serialized with the serial number on the outside of the box. It's trivial for Apple to log the serial number of every phone sent to a store. It's also trivial for Apple to record every serial number that was legitimately purchased or used to fulfill a Apple Care claim. It takes an employee a little bit of effort to scan the remaining stock, but once they have the list of what they are supposed to have in stock compared to what they actually have in stock they know exactly what serial numbers are missing. It's also useful to de-incentivize regular theft from an Apple Store. It's a pain to do this often enough to catch low quantity type thefts, but if a manager opens their store and realizes that someone stole 100 iPhones the night before, then it's definitely worth the effort to figure out which serial numbers were stolen and track them. It's also worth it to investigate the employee that didn't lock up properly the night before. Stolen phones become much less valuable if word gets out that Apple tracks them. A stolen phone still has value as parts, but the value has gone down quite a bit.
- Traster 6y agoIf I were using this system I would just have all devices locked by default, and at point of sale the bar code gets scanned, the DB gets updated and when the user boots up their phone for the first time and connects to the internet it verifies the sale. Maybe that's prone to false positives, so maybe they only manually mark phones as stolen, but it wouldn't be difficult.
- solarkraft 6y agoI'd assume they're just using the general theft protection that is just widely implemented. I also assume them to have precise enough tracking to know where which boxes are supposed to be.
- manigandham 6y agoiPhones have seen a major fall in theft once Apple started locking and disabling stolen devices. That's a major benefit for users.