There is a massive practical upside of this. It makes thefts worthless, or almost worthless as the only value is spare parts.
It worked like a charm for phones. Thefts of smarphones were rising very rapidly but then diminished as they become worthless to steal.
However it would be nice to be able to disable this for allowing usage in offline environment.
Did it really? In absence of official statistics, I think it just got normalized. When everyone has a monthly contract with insurance, it's not a tragedy if the phone gets stolen: you make a call, they send you a new phone, life goes on.
In the UK at least, phones do get stolen all over the place, it's just not reported anymore because it's simply a fact of life.
” Cell phone robberies and thefts from persons went down 50 percent in the first two years after the kill switch became mandatory on phones. In the past two years they fell again by another 8 percent, to a total of 1,754 last year.” 2018
Not only that. Perhaps most importantly it curbed the growth rate.