I think rendering stolen devices useless is also on the feature list. iPhone theft has become super rare, because a stolen device is neigh-impossible to activate and thus has little to no resale value.
When you add a Firmware Password to a Mac, you get a long recovery code as a fallback safety in case you lose/forget the password. Apple, if provided with proof of purchase for the serial number being inquired about, can create a bootable USB stick with a certificate generated using public/private key crypto for which Apple holds the private keys.
I suspect much of this newer functionality acts as a replacement for the Firmware Password, giving more options and making it a bit more well-known.
Wasnt there a video a while back where a famous repair guy from Australia could not use the camera of another exact same iphone. The original phone was not usable but when you put the orignal camera back it starts working.
Apple might start doing that for each and every component soon in the name of safety and security.
Anyway, I assume they do something with these unblocked phones, but maybe only androids :shrug:
This is simply untrue. It may be hard to activate it, but it still has value for its screen, case, camera, and other parts.
https://cbslocal.com/2018/01/31/despite-anti-theft-features-...
And then you they go even further with stories like that: https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphon...
Apple is doing such policy not for security, as they still own the master key to everything they produce (!), but for making sure people keep on buying new products and destroying the planet ever more. Screw this crap.
EDIT: If you like to think of yourself as an eco-responsible or eco-worried person, consider how "right to repair" (or "apple/samsung locks" on the other hand of the spectrum) fit into that worldview.
The word "get" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Activation lock does NOT block the second-hand trade of non-stolen devices. It blocks the illegal second-hand trade of stolen devices.
You are essentially advocating in favour of crime.
Based on your logic, you should be demanding that vehicle immobilisers and anti-theft devices are also anti-features. We wouldn't want car thieves (ahem, sorry, "second-hand owners") to be inconvenienced either. Once your car is stolen (ahem, sorry, "sold"), anything which impedes the free use by the new "owner" is ecological vandalism.
While you're at it, perhaps we should require all security safes to be openable with a paperclip, just in case you lose your keys. Otherwise people will keep buying new safes.
It also blocks the re-use of devices that were thrown away or given to a recycling center (because 95% of people who do this won't remember to turn off activation lock). I'm pretty sure that's what GP was referring to.
The point is, this is a solved problem.
(This was five years ago, by the way.)
You have cardboard boxes for electronics devices at the entrance of every supermarket of a certain size (by law) and you simply drop it there. Although admittedly most devices thrown in there do not end up on the second hand market (though i can't say i've never helped myself from these boxes in the past :D)
But the same goes for most ressourceries and other second-hand market: some people donate cardboard boxes full of stuff anonymously, the workers triage through it, then stumble upon devices to which they don't have a passphrase... and don't have any way of contacting the original owner.
Definitely not a solved problem in 99% of the world.
This is the kind of recycling service many people use. Very common here in Australia; companies pay a non trivial price for even a five year old iPhone or iPad.
> You have cardboard boxes for electronics devices at the entrance of every supermarket of a certain size (by law) and you simply drop it there.
It baffles me that on one hand you scorn me for my supposed affluence while inferring that people in your neighbourhood supposedly just dump perfectly good iPhones into a bin without wanting any money for them. If that’s not affluence, I don’t know what is.
People talk about Apple lock-in issues in general terms. No one seem to look at from a matter of practicality. I have fixed my iPhones every time there's an issue - because I actually can. My HTC camera had the purple glare issue. HTC refused to service it unless I pay $200 + shipping back and forth and be without a phone for 3 weeks!!! Same with my LG TV or Sony laptop.
I used to complain about the same things people in this thread too - about how draconian Apple is. Until I actually started using their products and realized they both last long and are repairable. The only downside is the cost - even that is not expensive in the long run (my Pro is now 7 years old and runs like a champ with just a battery replacement).
I can assure you noone uses that in France. When people want money from second-hand devices, they either go to Cash Converters (a chain of local stores) or sell them directly on LeBonCoin.fr (our craigslist equivalent). I don't know a single person who has ever sold a device apart from those avenues.
> It baffles me that on one hand you scorn me for my supposed affluence while inferring that people in your neighbourhood supposedly just dump perfectly good iPhones into a bin without wanting any money for them.
I don't intend to scorn anyone by pointing out material privileges. Owning a brand new iPhone is upper-class privilege, as it's over 1000$ which is about twice social support (RSA) in France (~500€/month) and is the same order of magnitude as french minimum wage for full-time (35h/week) work (~1100€ after taxes). In some corners of France, you can buy a house (though not the best/biggest one) with that kind of money. In Paris, you can rent a two-bedrooms apartment with that kind of money. Wherever you live in France, you can eat for more than a year (as a single person) with that kind of money. So yes it's a privilege to afford that kind of amount.
EDIT: Just to give you perspective, of all my relatives/acquaintances, the typical phone budget is between 50€ and 200€, which gets you a brand new super-crappy Samsung/Huawei phone (super crappy software wise because you're locked with the manufacturer's Android, hardware is a charm), or a decent second-hand Apple/Samsung phone. I know one or two geeks who put more because they want to acquire a FairPhone or a Librem, but they are the exception, not the norm. And to give more perspective, i live in one of the top10 richest countries on Earth, just imagine how the phone economy works in India or South Africa.
Now i'm not exactly saying most people in popular districts throw away their functioning phones in such bins. I'm saying if they're getting rid of anything electronics for recycling that's where they put it. More specifically, and in this order, folks would typically: donate it to a relative/acquaintance, sell it second hands via CashConverters/LeBonCoin or donate it to a local ressourcerie (donation-based second-hand hardware store), sell it for a few bucks on a flea market to a phone dealer, or as last resort throw it away with the old lightbulbs in supermarket "recycling" bins.
There are already plenty of perfectly good phones in the world; putting stolen iPhone 12 Pro devices into the second hand market lowers the value of existing devices.
Source?
> putting stolen iPhone 12 Pro devices into the second hand market lowers the value of existing devices
Funny argument. So would you be OK to remove iCloud lock from all devices except the newer line? That would be fine by my book for legit second-hand purposes. (Though i'm pretty sure Apple and its fanboys would be still pretty hostile to it)
I don’t need one, it’s entirely deductive reasoning. Do you dispute that people generally acquire a replacement phone if theirs is stolen? Do you dispute that phones have the same environmental footprint whether they’re an upgrade or a replacement for a stolen device?
As for your last paragraph, I have no idea what you’re talking about. That doesn’t sound like a response to what I said. I don’t want activation lock removed from any device.
No, i dispute that locking phones reduces theft. Because as i've explained, unlocking phones is perfectly possible and there's an entire gray-market industry dedicated to that. But yes i dispute your last statement, because it is true on an individual level but false on a collective level. If you get your phone stolen, you will buy a new one, but on a global scale, stolen goods are still circulating and therefore do not lead to increase in production of devices, and therefore has ZERO environmental impact.
> I don’t want activation lock removed from any device.
Then you truly are an enemy of the planet and the people, because you wish to keep your owner's privileges just for yourself and don't care if you have to set the entire planet on fire and ruin lives for that. I hope in a few decades, when we are struggling for basic survival (eg. finding drinkable water that has not been polluted by silicon/lithium/oil refinement), you remember that it is your choices and your acceptance of this fucked-up society that took us there.
Simply preventing passphrase recovery apart from a trusted centralized third party (Apple) is wrong on many levels: it's an ecological disaster, it's a disappointment to good-faith second-hand buyers, it's incentives for corruption within Apple and a shady iCloud unlocker business...
In essence, it's fundamentally incompatible with right to repair and fuels an Apple-insider mafia that honest people have to bribe in order to use a device. That's pretty much Apple's fault no doubt.
Which is not Apple's fault.
But they have decided to go against right to repair and against basic principles of ecology. Just as they have, in other fields, decided to go against basic principles of interoperability (Micro-USB/USB-C charger? Jack plug? Standard screws? who needs that, right?).
So yes Apple is harming users and is harming the environment. No amount of greenwashing can undo that.
No, it just makes it harder and feeds a gray market of phone unlocking. You appear to be a person who mostly deals with first-hand hardware in a rich western country, where there are Apple stores nearby.
Most people who sell or give away their devices DO NOT change/reset passphrases. This is true for all devices, and i've often had to recontact sellers in order to obtain such credentials. Sometimes, such communication is impossible, or the owner has forgotten the passphrase after leaving the device for years in a cupboard.
With usual computers, i can usually do without even the BIOS password and just boot on USB to setup a new system. Or at least i can take the hard drive into another computer, set it up and move it back in order to boot. With Apple/Samsung devices i end up piling them in my own cupboard and/or throwing them away, which is OK because i didn't pay for them.
It's infuriating when friends/neighbors came to me with devices they acquired in good faith for a reasonable price (<= 100€ for second-hand phone), and can't get it to boot. They then have to go to a phone store and pay 30-50€ more to get the phone (whether Apple or Samsung) unlocked, through a shady mafia (there's articles online about that). All this because of these evil companies.
> We wouldn't want car thieves (ahem, sorry, "second-hand owners") to be inconvenienced either. (...) While you're at it, perhaps we should require all security safes to be openable with a paperclip
You're making a bad faith argument here. Inconvenience is not the problem. Having to follow procedures to reset a device, changing a car security system because you were sold the car without the keys, or changing a safe lock are all possible though inconvenient. Apple/Samsung make it deliberately IMPOSSIBLE to reuse their device without going through shady third parties.
> You are essentially advocating in favour of crime.
In some circumstances, yes. I'm generally advocating in favor of burning down these Silicon Valley companies destroying our lives and our planet and making billions of the backs of workers. However, in this case i'm merely advocating for the right to repair and the second-hand market, both of which are perfectly legal occupations, at least in my country of residence (France).
I'd like to emphasize that through locking devices to a single "owner", you are essentially advocating in favor of crime, by creating incentives for corruption within iCloud services, while at the same time placing the burden of POTENTIAL theft (which i suspect is just a tiny portion of second-hand devices, though making statistics would be complex as we're talking illegal stuff here) on the good-faith customer who bought the phone on craigslist (or local equivalent) or a second-hand market without knowing it was locked. Yes, most people are that gullible. I don't think placing the cost of unlocking on second-hand owners is fair in any way, or creating any kind of sane incentives on a global scale.
And yes, it's a complete ecological disaster: ask me, i have a drawer full of apple devices (donated to me over the years) to which i don't have passwords. They are essentially highly-polluting paperweights, though i keep hoping they can at least come in handy one day when someone needs a spare part. Speaking of which, locking devices does not prevent scavenging for parts and therefore does not disable theft incentives, contrary to your argument.
> It's infuriating when friends/neighbors came to me with devices they acquired in good faith
If you don’t have the activation lock removed, you’re not the second-hand owner, you’re more than likely in possession of stolen property which has been dumped in your hands.
A stolen device doesn’t become ethically cleansed because someone bought it off the criminal “in good faith.” It’s still stolen goods.
All serious recycling services pay money for phones. Every single one I know of pays almost nothing if the device is activation locked, so it’s in the interest of the seller to deactivate it.
But I doubt that I could have gotten a firmware password for most of them. They would just have been thrown in the garbage.
I also got a couple of phones that could be used for testing web-apps. The last one was locked, and it would be pointless to try to get it unlocked.
Maybe the BIOS should give you full ownership if it can check that the device is not reported missing after one week. But I guess that would give robbers a motive to kill the owners.
Maybe devices should just unlock when they 5 years old.
Exactly! Thanks for confirming my personal experiences. I almost thought i was going crazy with all those Silicon Valley fanboys telling me my personal experience does not exist in the real world :)
> Maybe the BIOS should give you full ownership if it can check that the device is not reported missing after one week. But I guess that would give robbers a motive to kill the owners.
I don't think most people (even most thieves) would kill for a few hundred euros. But hey it's just my personal bet i don't have actual statistics :)
> Maybe devices should just unlock when they 5 years old.
Yeah maybe auto-timeout of BIOS lock could be nice to enforce for reusability of hardware. Something like you have to re-enable BIOS hardware (such as iCloud lock) every year or let it will auto-expire. This way the Apple cult can be happy with their brand new iCloud-locked iPhone which costs more than a second-hand car, while older devices could be reused instead of being thrown away or piled in a drawer.
If you like to think of yourself as an eco-responsible or eco-worried person, consider how much conspicuous consumption occurs because stolen items tend to get replaced. Theft causes people to "...keep on buying new products and destroying the planet ever more. Screw this crap."
If you wanna go all pedant on it, let's do... Are you seriously claiming that your "right" to own a device that cannot be used by anyone else without your explicit approval even after your death outweighs my presumption of innocence?
Going around and claiming everyone who hasn't got a specific passphrase is a thief isn't helping make your case credible. You're just ridiculing yourself to people who can't afford first-hand devices.
My right to own a secure device massively outweighs any desires held by criminals, or downstream beneficiaries of criminal activity.
If i find your phone and it lets me know of a way to contact you, i'll probably return it to you whether there's an activation lock or not. It's a common courtesy that applies to wallets as well.
> My right to own a secure device massively outweighs any desires held by criminals
Your device is not in any case secure, as Apple has all the keys to break in. That's why there's an entire gray-market of icloud unlocking based on corrupting Apple workers.
Since you are so much in favor of private property, i suggest you invest in a self-destructing phone, wallet and car. If anyone who doesn't match your DNA even just touches it, they should get blown up along with the device. Because that's the only way to be sure you own stuff while making everyone else's life terrible for your little material comfort. /s
Why can't I, as an owner, choose to unlock the mac myself without having an external authority to "let" me?
I don't have statistics at hand, and overall the M1 is pretty new so it's not a problem for this device YET, but it's a serious problem i notice several times a year in my close circle.
Activation lock has nothing to do with the phone's pin or passphrase, by the way. It's tied to an iCloud account. In the exceedingly rare instance where someone has forgotten the pin they used to unlock a device continuously for two or three years, they can disown the device by signing into icloud.com from any web browser.
It's curious that you don't even know how the process works, which makes me begin to doubt that you've ever had to deal with it.
Not talking about Apple hardware/software specifically here, but i don't see the same here. Most computers donated to associations i'm involved with was never wiped, even when coming from corporations/institutions. Sometimes though, we do receive computers without (EDIT:) harddrive, but it's still the minority. I can count on my two hands the times someone has donated to us fresh system installs (user data wiped), in over two decades.
> they can disown the device by signing into icloud.com from any web browser
That is, assuming you know these credentials. Most people who are not entirely locked inside the Apple walled garden create an account because they're forced to but don't care/remember actual credentials, then forget it. Same goes with other kinds of credentials, not just Apple... but only forgetting Apple (and a few others, like Samsung) credentials turns hardware into useless paperweights.
Or maybe the person has diseased, or moved to a foreign country. Or maybe they've just donated the old phone in a box full of random stuff and by the time you realize the phone is locked the person has already gone and you have no way to reach them. In my personal experience, even with hardware directly donated by friends, fishing for an old passphrase more often than not raises "uuuuuuugh i gotta have this password somewhere, let me check and i'll call you back in a few days" (<-- loop here for about 3 months before you give up).
> It's curious that you don't even know how the process works
I pretty much know about it, thanks. I was suggesting precisely that iCloud lock be entirely removed, and instead a recovery mechanism would wipe the entire device as a privacy-protecting measure.
You have no idea how much of the stuff you receive is dumped on you after being stolen (or otherwise misappropriated) and judged too worthless to fence.
But we certainly know that only the tiniest fraction of devices go to recycling centres like yours, and so of course you’re going to see mostly activation locked ones which have no market value—and not the other 99.9% of devices where activation lock didn’t preclude second hand sale, trade in, or commercial refurbishing/recycling.
That's a lot of ifs to simply use a device. Most devices, including pencils, bikes and cars, do not come with such troubles. Hell, even most phones and computers do not come with that.