[msoad]

My girlfriend's phone is stollen and last location is in China. I'm sure they are selling the parts and the motherboard is useless. If those parts wouldn't work with other phones this theft would be less incentivized.

Serial lock is a good thing if the owner had the option to unlock their phone's parts on Apple's website to be usable for repairs etc.

[gchamonlive]

Scraping stolen goods for parts doesn't happen because it can be done. It is viable because manufacturers make access to spare parts artificially difficult or expensive.

Locking a device to serial is adding insult to injury when companies like Apple decide to campaign against Right to Repair. It must be said that Apple made strides towards making repairing phones easier, but as long as counterfeit or stolen parts remain economically viable, this kind of market will exist.

[labcomputer]

> but as long as counterfeit or stolen parts remain economically viable, this kind of market will exist.

The point of serialization is precisely to make stolen parts unviable economically, so you’ve painted yourself into a bit of a corner there.

> It is viable because manufacturers make access to spare parts artificially difficult or expensive.

After paying a shop to repair an iPhone with a generic screen, I believe genuine parts cost more because they are better, not due to artificial scarcity. Not only were the colors off, the battery life was less with the new screen.

[rickdeckard]

> The point of serialization is precisely to make stolen parts unviable economically, so you’ve painted yourself into a bit of a corner there.

If every single spare-part can also be ordered new and the sum of usable components from a stolen iPhone totals to ~60USD (excluding the mainboard because it is marked as stolen and fused), it's no longer economically viable to steal an iPhone, send it to another country, disassemble it for parts, test the parts and resell them.

As of today, some parts cannot be purchased by third parties at all, so grey-market sourcing is a viable economy.

> After paying a shop to repair an iPhone with a generic screen, I believe genuine parts cost more because they are better, not due to artificial scarcity. Not only were the colors off, the battery life was less with the new screen.

In the pre-Apple world this was already solved: Manufacturers printed their logo on the spare-part, so buyers knew when they get a genuine part or not. 3rd parties are still allowed to produce parts, but faking the logo qualifies as counterfeit --> If you want an original part, ask for an original part and pay the premium

[gchamonlive]

> The point of serialization is precisely to make stolen parts unviable economically, so you’ve painted yourself into a bit of a corner there.

Assuming this kind of lock is unbreakable and all the parts in the phone are locked, you mean, which is a big assumption in the long run. A side effect is that you can't reuse parts from a bricked phone in another, which increases waste without actually addressing the problem which is access to spare parts.

> I believe genuine parts cost more because they are better, not due to artificial scarcity

Price is not the only restriction, but also the number of parts you can order, having to send back the damaged one (which prevents stocking on spare parts for the future) and the exclusion of third party repair shops. In any case I acknowledged that what apple did is indeed a good step, but the repair system can be improved.

[crote]

Why not give the owner the option to lock the parts instead? I bet a lot of people don't even consider potential reuse when they intentionally discard their phone.

[LeanderK]

just tie it to the apple-id like the phone itself