[aspenmayer]

Yeah, I know. I feel for you. This sucks! So what is going on here?!

Someone may have owned or used the computer before you, even if you bought it “new.” It might have been purchased and returned and resold as new without your knowledge, and not properly removed from a prior associated Apple ID, perhaps. It might have been purchased fraudulently by this hypothetical prior owner. Or your purchase may have been flagged as fraud post-sale by the vendor for unknown or no reason, and reported to Apple as stolen by said vendor.

Apple will be able to help you with any of these concerns, if you are the legitimate owner. I don’t mean to offend, or to imply or to suggest you are not. All Apple needs to prove ownership is a picture of your receipt or a screenshot of the invoice if purchased online, whether from Apple or a third party.

[KermitTheFrog]

You right. And one of the possible Apple’s reason is that this MacBook may be stolen(from the store or reseller). In this case Apple ask for proofs of purchase.

[newman8r]

> All Apple needs to prove ownership is a picture of your receipt or a screenshot of the invoice if purchased online, whether from Apple or a third party.

If that's true, couldn't someone just print out a fake invoice, with no way for them to verify it either way?

[RKearney]

I’ve never seen invoices or receipts without some kind of unique identifier on them that could then be verified. My receipts from Chipotle are even uniquely identified by the store number, register number, date, and incrementing order number for the day.

[newman8r]

I wonder what happens if the third party retailer you bought it from goes out of business and can no longer be verified. Must be relatively rare. I'm curious if they just give the consumer the benefit of the doubt in those cases.

[aspenmayer]

As Apple is the first company to ever reach a $3 trillion dollar market cap, I’m not sure they find this to be a high priority, as they have the means to both track and remotely disable stolen devices. I believe the first time they deployed this capability en masse was after protests and looting a year or so ago.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/local-authorities-wi...