[rixthefox]

I think the harshness is on point. We've gotten to a point where people's lives are deeply connected inside their devices and people need to understand that it's not "just a phone" anymore.

Just like it's the buyers responsibility to make sure they aren't purchasing a stolen vehicle, it should be equally the buyers responsibility to ensure they are not purchasing a stolen phone. Proof of a clean IMEI would be a start. The problem stems from most countries outside the US not taking the IMEI database seriously and so in some countries it's possible to activate a phone with a reported stolen IMEI.

I personally think Apple's choice to restrict activating stolen iPhones is a smart move overall. If countries won't use the IMEI database, this is the next best thing. It's not our responsibility to "unlock" phones for people because they didn't perform due diligence.

[ChuckNorris89]

>We've gotten to a point where people's lives are deeply connected inside their devices and people need to understand that it's not "just a phone" anymore.

Then it your responsibility to have backups no? Forget theft, if you keep all your most valuable data on just your phone alone, you're one accident away from loosing it al, via so many ways other than theft.

>Just like it's the buyers responsibility to make sure they aren't purchasing a stolen vehicle, it should be equally the buyers responsibility to ensure they are not purchasing a stolen phone

Now you're moving the goalposts. A phone is not a car. If my car is stolen, I can't just walk into a Ford-Store and buy a new one on the spot for $1000.

What about stolen bikes? Police don't bother investigating such things and they'll basically laugh you out of the police station.

[Kye]

A growing number of people only have a smartphone. This is probably alien to most people here, but I've had more than a few friends who haven't owned a laptop or tower in years, if they ever did. It's only recently that you could even connect a USB mass storage device to most phones to do an offline backup. I'm not sure apps for that even exist.

[ChuckNorris89]

>A growing number of people only have a smartphone.

Yes, so do I and everyone else, but that's why most people pay for cloud backup services (iCloud, etc) or set up their own if they're tech savvy enough. So when they break their phone, their data is still safe.

Still, this has nothing to do with theft. You can easily drop your phone on the ground or have it fall in the ocean on vacation. If your phone is such a valuable tool to you that you can't live without then it's up to you to get various insurance policies (phone insurance, a backup phone, etc.)

[alexvoda]

You could connect mass storage to an Android Phone for a very very long time if not from the start. Certainly from the beginning if you consider SD cards to be mass storage.

And you could physically connect mass storage to an iPhone since before the iPhone (iPod days, same connector, same adapter) but unless it was jailbroken you could do almost nothing with it

[skinnymuch]

Cloud backups work if you have one device