I have no problem with blacklisting stolen parts. What does concern me is when devices are abandoned or given away, not marked as stolen but still activation locked with no means of getting it unlocked.
Last month I reset my device to reinstall macos and selected log out of icloud and wipe. I assumed this would remove the activation lock but it did not and I had to put my password in. I've found that removing activation lock is an intentionally confusing and misleading process. This only exists to create ewaste and pad the bottom line.
Erase all content and settings[1] also disables activation lock. Wiping a hard disk alone is not sufficient because a lot of information is stored elsewhere (eg. biometric fingerprint data).
Activation Lock is only available[2] on Intel Macs with a T2 chip, or Apple Silicon Macs. All of these machines support erase all content and settings.
If this is reproducible, then do it and show us. Otherwise, we can only assume you misinterpreted the iCloud login screen as being the Activation Lock gate.
It’s your word vs. my experience and Apple’s docs. If I’m wrong, it’s really easy for you to demonstrate this.
I think the entire point is that the process is confusing and easy to mess up. Even if there is a way to successfully do it, that doesn't take away from the point being made that the OP commenter tried to do this and failed. Telling them they did it wrong doesn't change that argument.
I mean, you can't really get much simpler than the process, I've got to be honest.
Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iphone. It's the first google search result from "how do I reset my iphone". It works 100% of the time and is so simple my mom figured it out on her own.
The icloud login for a non locked device happens after hello. In my locked device case it listed my icloud email and prompted for the password. It also said something about being locked.
I'm not going to repro this because it takes a while to set up my dev env.
I had a similar issue. Followed all the instructions by Apple on preparing the laptop for a new owner: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102773 and then gave it to the neighbor's kid for their school. It has the whole hello page, but turned out they had to login as me first. The standard part was that the laptop contributed being listed on my devices and I couldn't remove it, UNTIL we logged in once again as me - after a full wipe. I figured either I messed up the process or got stuck in an edge case flow. Either way, it would have been very annoying if the new user wasn't living close and somebody I knew.
> This only exists to create ewaste and pad the bottom line.
But it obviously reduces the reward for stealing devices, which probably reduces crime? If a thief, given the opportunity to steal my iPhone or an Android phone, takes the Android phone because it’s easier to fence - I’ll gladly give Apple money to be part of that group.
> But it obviously reduces the reward for stealing devices, which probably reduces crime?
It doesn't reduce crime, it just shifts it to easier targets.
Instead of figuring out why people commit crimes and making society work better to eliminate those reasons, we just shift the burden around and make things objectively worse for everyone.
I get that this is a super hard problem, one that likely can't ever be 100% solved, and Apple isn't responsible for it, but it frustrates me that everything is about controlling symptoms, never about curing the disease.
Afaik, they do have similar systems. I had to bypass the Samsung lock on my FIL's old phone, thankfully it was a phone that was possible to bypass because he didn't know his samsung account password (and didn't know he had one) and wasn't getting the reset mails either.
You asserted “this only exists to pad the bottom line”, and I’m refuting that by giving a reason the feature provides value to me.
“Stolen mode” isn’t really a thing with Activation Lock; Apple correctly assumes that the average victim of theft isn’t alert enough to flip some switches in iCloud.
Thieves know that iPhones are useless - now even more so - in their default state, and can only be removed from that state with deliberate action from the legitimate owner.
That has real life value, and so your accusation that it “only exists to pad the bottom line” is wrong.
Their point is that they make the process to remove the lock more confusing so as to make it so more people accidentally leave it on and brick their used devices.
This doesn't mean the theft lock feature itself doesn't have a purpose, just that making it confusing to remove was intentional to decrease hardware reuse.
As someone who always trades in old devices, I promise you every single reseller willing to buy your phone will have these instruction as part of their “sell to us” process. I’ve used at least 3-4 different places over the years.
Send them a locked device, they’ll send it back because it’s unsellable.
No legit place is buying locked devices. Which means they don’t sell them.
Of course you are. If anyone except the original owner can remove the lock, it’s more valuable to a thief. (Same if the owner can be tricked into removing it or do so accidentally.)
I’d consider it a massive failure on Apple’s part if logging out removed ownership locks.
You’re concluding intent based on a process being confusing to you. That’s a massive and untenable leap. Like, repairing a toaster or building a rocket is complicated and can be confusing—that doesn’t prove conspiracy.
Not log out of session but log out and wipe in the reset device menu. If it's confusing to me it's at least this confusing to the average person which in my opinion explains the piles of not stolen activation locked ewaste. The outcome of a process is its intent if it's not changed.
Yeah, I can see why someone might assume that the activation lock would be disabled in that scenario. But on the other hand, I can also see why someone would absolutely expect that it wouldn't be.
I might want (and have wanted) to reinstall macOS and start fresh without any intention of relinquishing or transferring ownership of the physical device. And I might want to log out of iCloud because I don't want to sync my personal stuff on that computer anymore, or because something funky is happening with how messages or photos are syncing and I just want to reset it all. I'd be pretty pissed if, six months after reconfiguring everything, someone nabbed my laptop and I discovered that activation lock had been automatically disabled for me the whole time without my explicitly doing so.
Given these mutually irreconcilable user expectations, I can see why Apple would opt for a design that favors the more cautious approach where you have to press a very specific sequence of buttons to disable the lock. Maybe I'm just selfish, but knowing a laptop I sent away couldn't be repurposed but ended up as e-waste would make me feel a little guilty, but knowing a laptop I didn't want to lose got stolen with all my stuff on it exposed to the thief would make me apoplectic with rage.
Last month I reset my device to reinstall macos and selected log out of icloud and wipe. I assumed this would remove the activation lock but it did not and I had to put my password in. I've found that removing activation lock is an intentionally confusing and misleading process. This only exists to create ewaste and pad the bottom line.