
Apple’s Activation Lock Will Make It Difficult to Refurbish Macs - jbuild
https://www.ifixit.com/News/apples-activation-lock-will-make-it-very-difficult-to-refurbish-macs
======
crazygringo
I'm entirely on Apple's side here.

It makes me very happy, as a consumer, knowing that if someone steals my
phone, they can't get any value out of it. I don't _want_ them to be able to
sell it to a refurbisher for cash. And I don't want them to be able to do it
with my laptop either.

And for refurbishers, it's not hard to make it an obvious required step for
anyone looking to sell their own legitimately-owned phone. You just make it
part of the instructions, and force them to check a couple boxes or popups
acknowledging this before they can print the shipping label to send it in. And
if the person doesn't follow instructions, you send it back to them.

The headline should really be "...will make it difficult to refurbish _stolen_
Macs". Not a lot of sympathy.

Edit: in response to comments... yes these can still be sold for parts. But it
still makes me feel better a thief will get $30, not $300, for my phone --
that's often enough of a difference between it being worth it or not. And if
people are dropping these off for recycling, isn't the expectation that
they're being used for parts at best anyways? If they're high enough value to
actually be refurbished and resold, then it's worth putting the recycling bins
behind cashiers or similar, who are trained to first verify they're unlocked
before accepting them.

~~~
aeturnum
It would be simple for apple to extend the system by allowing recyclers to ask
apple to send a message to the previous owner of the device. This would be
extremely pro-consumer, because it would allow lost devices to be returned via
an official channel. It would also allow users to release their claims on
hardware they meant to give away.

The "solution" of just expecting the previous owner to never make a mistake is
unreliable and totally unnecessary. Apple can act as the common contact for
the system they created.

~~~
snuxoll
> It would be simple for apple to extend the system by allowing recyclers to
> ask apple to send a message to the previous owner of the device. This would
> be extremely pro-consumer, because it would allow lost devices to be
> returned via an official channel. It would also allow users to release their
> claims on hardware they meant to give away.

It would also make recovery of stolen devices easier. Refurbisher has Apple
contact the owner, owner says it was stolen, person gets their equipment back.

I don't see the downside here, literally everyone gets what they want - people
can sell or dispose of their old devices as they see fit, refurbishers and
third-party repair shops can get parts and devices they need to run their
business, Apple gets to continue touting the security of the platform, and
victims of theft have a better chance of recovering their often expensive
gadgets.

~~~
fortran77
This really can't work. They'd get unscrupulous people taking phones they sold
back, or a couple who broke up where it's not clear who "owns" the phone.
Nobody wants to put himself in the middle of these things.

~~~
chasil
I do not agree.

Apple could play the go-between. They could alert the previous owner that the
device has been found, and provide a grace period where a user could request
return, for a fee, including Apple's S&H, and a finders' fee for the reporting
agent.

At the expiration of the grace period, Apple could provide a device reset
code.

~~~
llampx
I fail to see why Apple would do this. Is this going to bring them more money?

~~~
rootusrootus
If they did it, it would probably need to be accounted for as a form of
goodwill.

------
mrtksn
I am a big fan of iFixit and dig their teardowns just as much as the device
releases themselves but their "Companies should prioritize on ease of repair
even if it makes the devices less portable and less secure" narrative flips
me.

I never, ever buy devices for repair purposes or to resell them without
bothering to do a factory re-set. The ideal device is one that doesn't need a
repair and I do not accept for my devices to be re-purposed without my
permission. The whole "this is garbage and this company should make this in a
way that we like" is really annoying when it is written in an authoritative
tone and rallies a mob.

I think they are stuck in the "When you only have a hammer, everything looks
like a nail" mentality. I see a similarly annoying tone in the more techie
social media personalities too, they don't just explain what's not working for
them, they actually lecture the engineers that made this thing. The number of
followers is not an engineering degree’s GPA.

It is like a flavour of anti-intellectualism.

iFixit is great but I don't buy that they are speaking on behalf of the user.
I would have been more supportive if they were saying something like "This
hurts our business, it would have been great if Apple took some steps to make
things more repairable"

~~~
AnthonyMouse
It's not especially shocking that the people doing repairs are the people
talking about repairability.

And you're taking it from the perspective of someone buying a new device from
Apple who doesn't care about anybody else. Consider the perspective of a low
income person who would otherwise buy a refurbished phone which will now be
unavailable or more expensive, or the environmental perspective of having to
manufacture new phones (future landfill) instead of reusing what already
exists. If we care about other people then we should care about the
consequences of what Apple is doing here.

~~~
scarface74
No, that person would be able buy a refurbished phone from a source like
Gazelle that insures that the rightful owner has deactivated the phone and
knows that it isn’t stolen.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
There are a zillion phones that come to be refurbished because they originally
had corporate owners. The IT department issues new phones and ends up with a
giant pile of old phones, many of which are damaged, which aren't worth their
time to sort out and resell, so they get thrown on a pallet and go in bulk to
an electronics recycler.

The recycler sorts the phones from the PCs from the laser printers and the
phones go to a company that refurbishes phones. Now they've got a thousand
iPhones from a dozen companies, legally-obtained, which are locked to the
personal Apple account of some salesman three deep in the supply chain and
they don't even know which specific company they're from, much less which
salesman.

So none of those phones can be refurbished, that person _can 't_ buy them, and
the remaining phones they could buy -- which necessarily can't go to as many
people as the larger number of phones -- cost more as a result of supply and
demand.

~~~
scarface74
How do you propose you fix that and still keep shady refurbishers from selling
stolen phones? Even if the refurbishing company is trustworthy what is to
guarantee that all of the employees are and they don’t get kickbacks for
mixing in stolen phones with the legitimate ones?

This isn’t far fetched. Many SIM swaps are done by employees of carriers
taking bribes to help thieves perform SIM swaps. They aren’t all done by
social engineering.

Now suppose none of that occurs and Apple unlocks phones. Now a phone that has
user data on it that was formerly encrypted is available to a third party.

Yes Apple could perform a remote wipe, but again why would Apple want to get
in the middle of that? What if someone was being malicious and copied
someone’s serial number and asked Apple to do a remote wipe?

Long story short, if the phone wasn’t unlocked before it was given to the
refurbisher, you have know way of knowing whether the phone was stolen.

------
nkrisc
> “People don’t steal a phone to then go run and drop it off at their local
> recycling center,” he quips. And smartphone thefts have plummeted over the
> last several years, so stolen phones are becoming less of a problem in the
> first place.

And this excerpt links to this article:
[https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/DA-Gasc-n-says-
SF-...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/DA-Gasc-n-says-SF-phone-
robberies-cut-in-half-11541650.php)

Which mentions:

> Smartphone robberies have plunged 50 percent in the past three years in San
> Francisco after they soared to epidemic heights and prompted a push for
> remote “kill switches” to become mandatory in the devices, District Attorney
> George Gascón announced Thursday.

So the article states that the Activation Lock isn't necessary because device
thefts have plummeted. But they plummeted because of Activation Lock and
similar features. That's circular reasoning if I ever saw it.

~~~
dwild
> But they plummeted because of Activation Lock and similar features.

Activation Lock != kill switches

A kill switch is a switch. It's an action. The activation lock is always
there, the action is required to remove it, not to kill it.

Kill switches are fine, because then the issue only happens when it's actually
stolen.

Activation lock aren't fine because it also happens when it has been sold.

------
jedberg
You can't make a security feature with a backdoor, or it's not security
feature anymore. I'm with Apple on this. They really have no way of knowing
that you're selling/giving away the phone, so they can't have the phone tell
you to unlock.

That's really on the buyer. They need to know about getting the seller to
reset.

Right now Sprint is running a deal where they give you a new phone if you turn
in the old one. In very big bold letters, they explain that if the phone
arrives locked, they will send it back and then charge you the full price of
your new phone and shipping your old one back.

That's the right way for a reseller to handle this.

~~~
izacus
> You can't make a security feature with a backdoor, or it's not security
> feature anymore.

Why are you so 100% sure that there's no way that Apple could design a system
to keep it secure and allow recycling? There's hundreds of ways they could
design their security flow where recycling is possible.

~~~
gruez
>Why are you so 100% sure that there's no way that Apple could design a system
to keep it secure and allow recycling? There's hundreds of ways they could
design their security flow where recycling is possible.

Can you list some of them? How would you prevent unscrupulous recylers from
turning into fences for stolen macs?

~~~
FarAdvance4
Not even just the recycling business owner. Hire Joe over here, he works
there, learns the systems and how to unlock the devices legitimately.

What happens when he leaves, or is fired, or decides he's going to make some
side money...

------
mvanbaak
In my opinion, the article is wrong. Yes, if you get a mac with activation
lock enabled, from someone who is not the person who can disable it, YOU are
wrong. Recyclers etc should simply educate their staff to ask and validate
that activation lock/find my is disabled.

Here in .nl when you go to trade in your used phone, they ask, they check, and
they tell you how to do it (they go all the way though the process until the
step where you have to confirm, and they let the soon-to-be-ex-owner confirm
the reset) before they even accept the phone. The person who wrote the article
should stop blaming the wrong party in this 'problem'. It's not up to apple to
unlock (or create a backdoor that will render the feature worthless) the
devices, but the party that accepts the devices for recycling/resale.

------
mullen
> “We receive four to six thousand locked iPhones per month,” laments Peter
> Schindler, founder and owner of The Wireless Alliance, a Colorado-based
> electronics recycler and refurbisher. Those iPhones, which could easily be
> refurbished and put back into circulation, “have to get parted out or
> scrapped,” all because of this anti-theft feature.

Maybe 6 thousand people get their phones stolen every month and don't want the
theft to get any value out of the phone?

This whole article is pretty stupid. Apple is making iPhone and, now, Macs
worthless if they are stolen. It is up to buyers of used iPhones and Macs to
make sure their "new" phones are not locked. Apple is just responding to what
customers want for the benefit of customers and not thieves.

~~~
eropple
So you picked up, before you spun up your hauteur engine, that that number is
not six thousand _stolen_ iPhones, but six thousand _trashed and recycled_
ones? And that there's no way to communicate to a user that their lock
prevents it from being done?

There's no reason why a user can't be asked by Apple "hey, a recycler received
this locked iPhone, do you want to wipe and unlock it for recycling?" save for
an unwillingness to implement it; as-is, this just and only just generates
waste. But it let you _get mad_ , so that's cool, I guess.

~~~
filleduchaos
I think the (valid if cynical) implication is that a large number of those
"trashed and recycled" phones were trashed and recycled by people who
are...not the owners.

~~~
retrac
Perhaps. Thieves don't strike me as the type to be more eco-conscious than
average, though. I'm betting they're mostly just thrown out. Many people can't
be bothered with the hassle of trying to sell a used device.

~~~
threeseed
Not the thieves themselves but buyers.

Used to be very common for someone to buy an iPhone on eBay, realise it was
activation locked and then see comments everywhere on how to remove it.

My guess is many of those people would end up just throwing the phone away.

~~~
FireBeyond
Hah.

I had the buyer of my stolen iPhone 8 on eBay contact me and say "Hey, it says
this phone is yours - since you've probably already replaced it, can you help
me unlock it so I'm not -also- getting ripped off?".

Pretty ballsy.

~~~
lonelappde
Maybe for a fee it's worth it.

------
torarnv
«In other words, they won’t be able to do much with it besides scrap it for
parts.»

Or, you know, talk to the friend that sold them the phone.

Hyperbole doesn’t sell their point at all.

------
jessriedel
Was there no other source for this story besides this piece of hyperbole?
Everything is a "nightmare" and "chaos" with "victims" and phones sent to the
"shredder". We shouldn't support this garbage writing.

~~~
StillBored
The process for recovering a locked iphone is problematic if the user forgets
both the iphone password and the icloud password (because it was only used
once a year before).

That happened to a family member recently, I guess they were using face id
regularly and changed their pin at one point and by the time they needed it
again couldn't remember it.

The part that really pisses me off is the "10 strikes and we wipe your phone
bit". That happened to me too on an infrequently used iphone last year. I'm
pretty sure I would have remembered the password because it was one a few
dozen pins I use, but I didn't get the chance to try all of them because the
fscking phone decided to wipe itself first (not attached to icloud).

~~~
crooked-v
You have to specifically turn on the "Erase all data on this iPhone after 10
failed passcode attempts" option for that to happen. If you do that without
being very confident about remembering your passcode, it's your own dang
fault.

------
repler
There’s a reason why the ‘98 Honda Civic and ‘97 Honda Accord are the most
stolen cars to this day.

Anti-theft features largely work very well.

Removing the anti-theft features from very expensive phones is going to be a
non-starter for the vast majority of people.

~~~
sschueller
I thought the primary reason is the high resale value while also being
extremely common. It also blends in well with traffic unlike a Ferrari.

------
protomyth
Well, I'm getting a little sick of Apple locking the actual owner of the
device out and then telling us to go talk to the phone company who has no clue
what Apple is talking about then fax in some documents that might or might not
get Apple to unlock the device. The thought of this psychosis being brought to
the Mac side of the house is just painful. I can only imagine how a non-
technical person feels when their phone rebels on them and they aren't
anywhere near an Apple Store. The last phone we had problems with had to be
taken to a store some 400 miles away from the place where the person lived
because a couple of weeks of BS phone calls didn't do it.

~~~
scarface74
How is Apple locking the owner of the phone out?

~~~
protomyth
Wish I knew the root cause. It's happened a number of times and passcodes and
biometrics don't work and they have receipts. The phone is just locked. I
assume there was a change made that they didn't understand or they just put
the wrong code in. I just cannot chalk it ALL up to user problems given we hit
the half-dozen point.

------
faitswulff
I feel like most posters here aren't reading the full article, specifically
this paragraph:

> When asked what could be done, Schindler suggests Apple implement a bypass
> that would allow certified recyclers and refurbishers to unlock donated
> devices if they’re not reported lost or stolen. And Shindler says 99% of the
> locked devices his facility receives aren’t lost or stolen. “People don’t
> steal a phone to then go run and drop it off at their local recycling
> center,” he quips.

Allowing certified (by Apple) refurbishers and recyclers to unlock the phones
- iff it's not reported lost or stolen - doesn't seem like an open invitation
to theft to me.

~~~
mvanbaak
> Apple implement a bypass that would allow certified recyclers and
> refurbishers to unlock donated devices

Sure, and now please tell me how long it will take for the non certified
'recyclers' to also know how to bypass this activation lock? This bypass will
render the whole feature useless, and can be removed the moment this bypass is
implemented.

~~~
shkkmo
Not if the bypass requires a cryptographicly signed verification by Apple that
the device was not reported stolen.

~~~
mvanbaak
This still leaves a window where it can be abused. If i get robbed it will
take some time before i can enter another system to login to icloud and mark
my phone/macbook as stolen.

~~~
shkkmo
Obviously there can be a delay, are you commenting in a charitable manner or
merely being obtuse for fun?

------
mikl
Generally it’s not too difficult to get someone to unlock the Mac before
returning it.

The upside of the activation lock is amazing. I remember how it was before, I
had several friends who had their phones stolen - some were even mugged for
it.

These days, criminals don’t bother trying to steal iPhones, because they know
they’ll be a useless brick that no fence will pay for. Getting this for the
Mac, too, is a massive benefit to Mac-owners.

------
michaelmrose
Why can't the feature include a way to send a message to the user requesting
permission to remove the lock? The user could respond by allowing, dismissing
which would require an exponential back off before sending another message or
deny forever barring all further messages.

------
acallan
If refurbishers were able to bypass the activation lock, what would the point
of an activation lock be in the first place? This is perhaps one of the most
important use cases, and it's a good sign that iFixit is complaining about it.

~~~
NedIsakoff
I'm sure there will be tons of "Legit" refurbishers that will unlock for a
"donation".

------
supernova87a
So first the attorneys general of the various states begged Android/Apple/etc
to implement activation locks to help reduce phone theft. And now the
recyclers beg for an easier way to deactivate it to increase recyclable parts
content.

Is it any wonder that manufacturers sometimes throw their hands up at how many
constraints they're asked to design to?

------
kgwxd
Is there any proof this features reduces theft?

~~~
OrangeMango
There is a high correlation with activation lock becoming widespread and the
decrease in phone theft. That's not proof, but...

~~~
hyperbovine
Actually it is, if you are willing to assume that the arrival of activation
lock was completely exogeneous.

------
justusthane
> And smartphone thefts have plummeted over the last several years, so stolen
> phones are becoming less of a problem in the first place.

I wonder why? Maybe due to theft-prevention features like Activation Lock?

~~~
cbdumas
Yep if you click through to the article they linked that's _exactly_ what it
says.

------
lacker
Apple can still unlock these phones. If people are really concerned about the
waste generated by unlockable stolen phones, they should try turning it in at
an Apple store.

------
hombre_fatal
It's pretty satisfying seeing how many perfectly good looking iPhones on
Facebook Marketplace in my city have to spell out "parts only". I ended up
just buying a $200 iPhone 8 from Amazon Renewed instead of looking for a legit
seller.

Repair shops can buy them up for cheap and legitimate owners get cheaper 3rd
party repairs, though at the unfortunate expense of the theft victim. But at
least the "middle man" doesn't get a huge payoff.

------
ndesaulniers
> When asked what could be done, Schindler suggests Apple implement a bypass
> that would allow certified recyclers and refurbishers to unlock donated
> devices if they’re not reported lost or stolen.

> In cases when a device is lost or stolen, Schindler says he’s more than
> happy to hand it off to law enforcement in order to find the owner, but
> that’s a rare occurrence.

Huh, yeah, because that could never be abused, and all refurbishers are
ethical and not incentivized to claim willful ignorance in order to profit
from the sale of stolen goods, right?

------
gok
They misspelled "steal"

------
bambax
The problem is with the environment cost. Let's tax manufacturers for every
device found whole in the trash. See how fast the problem gets solved.

(And yes, there are implementation issues to solve with this approach. But
none unsolvable.)

------
izacus
Umm... does that mean that those Macs can't be repaired in 3rd party shops
either now? Since if I remember correctly, on iPhones the repairers can't
replace the secure bonded components anymore.

~~~
mvanbaak
No. Repair means broken parts get replaced but the same owner (thus the person
who activated the mac) will get the device back.

This new feature simply means macbook robery will go down like the cellphone
robery went down after activation lock became normal. Thus, a better world.

------
pier25
Hopefully these kind of practices will be regulated in the future. Humanity
needs to reduce energy and resource consumption as much as possible.

What happened to Google's modular phone?

------
lanevorockz
As society degrades practices like this will be more and more valuable. It's
part of ultra urban societies and our inevitable future.

------
lonelappde
If something is getting stolen so much, that indicates it's too expense for
the society of exists in.

------
mensetmanusman
If Apple cares about the environment, they will fix this.

