[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.

[mrtksn]

My first iPhone was a used one, obtained from a willing seller who unlocked the device upon my purchase.

My purchase was not a freak one, it was not an exception to the rule. The rule is, the willing party unlocks the device when sells or gives it away.

Framing it as if iPhones or Macbooks are tied to the original owner and becomes e-waste after when the original buyer no longer needs it is not honest. Especially with the Apple products, the 2.nd hand market is very healthy and Macbooks and iPhones change hands until they become obsolete.

If we are going to turn into a socialist utopia where we share the resources willingly or not, I don't believe that it's Apple's device lock that's stopping us.

The same goes for the repairs, it is not true that manufacturers make devices unrepairable. In some cases, it might require more skill or equipment than other cases but these devices obey the laws of physics, therefore can be repaired. In some products, the miniaturization is way beyond what manual labour can handle but for those products companies and governments offer proper ways for disposal. IC's took over transistors and made things hard to repair, you throw away billions of perfectly fine transistors just because one transistor in the CPU went bad and this is OK because of the reliability is much better and the miniaturization made the material waste much smaller.