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what do you consider security here? you still lose the phone - the thief isn't going to return it to you, and he will still get some money for it from a fence.
by throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
what do you consider security here? you still lose the phone - the thief isn't going to return it to you, and he will still get some money for it from a fence.
- snovv_crash 4y agoFrom an economic perspective the thief doesn't have any incentive to steal the device in the first place.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y agodo you picture a mugger or a pickpocket caring about the economic perspective?
- rosnd 4y agoOf course they do. Until third party repair shops created a huge market for stolen iPhone parts, stealing them was significantly less attractive than other phones.
- rosnd 4y agoWell, they do. iPhones are still valuable after being parted out, although Apple has been combating this by requiring parts to be registered by them (and shamed for much of the same on HN)
- vetinari 4y ago> and shamed for much of the same on HN Deservedly. If there was a normal market, or at least access to spare parts, there would be no need for donor devices.
- rosnd 4y agoWhat does that look like? Stolen parts will always be cheaper. The warehouses full of people in Shenzhen tearing down millions and millions of stolen iDevices would still be chugging along, inserting stolen parts into the supply chain. Apple enforcing DRM on parts is very much a pro-consumer move, steadily taking us towards a world where a stolen iPhone will be worth nothing.
- acdha 4y agoStolen parts are always going to be cheaper unless the cost of producing the parts is lower than the disassembly cost. That could happen for screws but it’s never going to happen for the advanced components which are why the devices are actually being stolen.
- jquery 4y agoA bricked iPhone is worth way less than a functional one, making the victim much less of a “juicy” target (lower odds of a violent mugging, broken car window, home burglary, etc). It’s a perfectly rational decision to want iPhones to be known as worth 5% of their retail value if stolen. Less funding for organized criminal cartels, too.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y agothe junkie who has drawn a knife on you, broke your car window or broke into your house is going to take your shit first and ask questions later
- zimpenfish 4y ago> he will still get some money for it from a fence. From my understanding of the activation lock, the phone is effectively bricked - no-one can ever use it again. No fence is going to pay for a useless device.
- grishka 4y agoThe motherboard is useless. The rest of the parts can still be resold.
- rekoil 4y agoBut it lowers the incentive significantly regardless.
- szdva 4y agoThankfully Apple is working on that by pairing the parts to the motherboard and showing error messages if they don't match.
- grishka 4y agoThat's one way of looking at it. Another one is that it complicates DIY repairs.
- nunez 4y agothe lucrative parts (screen, camera arrays) are serialized and will not work on phones other than the one they were built for almost everything else is soldered onto the logic board and is futile to transfer so i think that stolen iphones with activation lock are 100% paperweights.