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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

But unlocking the bootloader, even only once official major updates has stopped, is a risky business move due to activation lock and Find My iPhone.

If they did this, there's a good chance phone theft creeps back to high levels, since thieves could just

1. wait until Apple releases new firmware that unlocks the bootloader

2. use that new firmwaare to wipe the memory that handles activation lock

3. re-install a fresh iOS

4. resell the phone

iPhone 8's still go for over $100 on eBay, so it's not unprofitable to 'inventory' stolen phones by throwing them in a desk drawer to sell within a few years.

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Android already has a solution to this. Unlocking the bootloader requires disabling activation lock.

Even back on the nexus line, if the phone was stuck in activation lock, you’d have to unlock with the google account and then with the phone unlocked you’d use adb to unlock the bootloader.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, a big point of contention is activation lock specifically. Unless you're buying $50-100 iPhone 7's and 8's off marketplace, chances are tons of devices you see in landfills are activation locked phones that either had their battery cut out, got cracked to the point where the user couldn't use the device, or were so badly damaged they just threw it away with no thought to reuse. In this case the iPhone(/iPad/Mac) is still locked, but enabling scrapyards to repurpose them by disabling activation lock would either allow criminals to do this as well, or if you had some vetting process to be able to remove the lock, it might just then the scrapyards de-facto dumps for stolen iPhones (since the scrapyards will like pay more for each phone once they can repurpose and sell them).

That's a lot of risk for $100 in 5 to ten years.

It might be for a small-time thief, but the more likely scenario is that they ship it to China (like they already do when they snatch an activation-locked phone and sell it for parts) and get $100 now, and the long-running shops in China do the long-term inventory for these phones instead of disassembling them for parts.

Thieves are not known for their patience. Stealing things that won't be valuable for several years is not a very good business.

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