[nemothekid]

>If this helped protect against theft, then why did they steal the phone anyway?

They are plenty of stories on Reddit and TikTok where the stolen phone ends up in China, and then the owner is phished into disabling iCloud so that the phone could be wiped. If not the sold is phone for parts. To me the very fact that you need an entire phishing ring to make stealing iPhones profitable means that there is some cost that deters thieves from targeting iPhones.

Barring phishing, the next best thing is to scrap it for parts. I can see Apple's reasoning here - if most of your growth is going to come from poorer nations it makes sense you don't your customer base worry about carrying a year's salary in their pocket.

I'm also unconvinced it's a "money grab" on Apple's part. Locking down repairs will not come anywhere close to replacing the lost revenue from the consumer's slowing upgrade cycle.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/10zg2o7/how_a_typica...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/yoataa/ever_since_m...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/rwlznf/warning_stol...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/rwlznf/warning_stol...

[circuit10]

You can tell the theft thing is an excuse from Apple because they don't do things like allowing you to unlock parts you own, or even buy genuine new parts that definitely stolen without silly restrictions like needing to put in a serial number first and then contact Apple to pair it (this is probably done to make it almost useless for repair shops because they want to push their even more restrictive "independent" repair program)

[nemothekid]

>tell the theft thing is an excuse from Apple because they don't do things like allowing you to unlock parts you own

This would only make sense if Apple had an existing system for customers to unlock their own parts and then disabled it. The system you are talking about doesn't exist, and the idea that they built X but didn't include X+1 because of "greed reasons" isn't entirely credibly.

While you could argue that maybe someone brought the idea up and it was shot down by some devilish exec, it's equally likely to me that

(1) no one at apple thought of the idea

(2) since the product would be customer facing it is some apple design hell along with the iPad calculator

(3) no one cared enough to spend the political points to push for the product

(4) the problem just isn't prevalent enough to justify the cost.

There are plenty of reasons why Apple could be building this to reduce theft while also not building some other auxiliary system.

[circuit10]

Something Louis Rossmann who advocates for right to repair, says (I'm paraphrasing of course) is that it's not necessarily that they explicitly go out of their way to say "let's make repair harder", but when there are no incentives to improve the situation it won't be worked on at all and that has the same effect, so it's still important to push them to do it

[flanked-evergl]

How do the thieves get the contact details of the person whose phone they stole to fish them? And why did they steal the iPhone I mentioned without having the contact details of the person?

[jabroni_salad]

In the last link, the user explains in the comments that when they marked the device as stolen, they could choose some text to display on the screen and they chose to include a phone number that they had access to.

Plenty of people hope for a good samaritan interaction and will do something like that.

also idk if they ever changed it, but a long time ago I found a phone that was locked and no identifying information shown. I asked siri to call 'my' mother and she arranged a pickup.

[flanked-evergl]

If thieves have to rely on people seeing thieves as good Samaritans and trusting thieves with their contact details after they were robbed by them, we definitely have entered a realm of absurdity. But while this hypothetical realm is devoid of all reason and logic, theft still remains.

[codetrotter]

> How do the thieves get the contact details of the person whose phone they stole to fish them?

If the phone is set to display notifications when locked, you can see the usernames of friends of theirs in notifications on the screen.

I found a locked iPhone on the ferry one time and saw Snapchat notifications from their friends on the lockscreen. I sent a message request to one of the users on the notifications, and told them that I found the phone on the boat and that the owner of the phone should contact the ferry company to retrieve the phone as I would hand it over to the crew of the ferry.

Similarly, if your goal was to be a thief instead of being helpful you might keep an eye on the Instagram notifications of the phone, and then cross-reference friends of those people to figure out who owns the phone.

[shagie]

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/05/re-victimization-from-po...

Granted, that's dealing with stolen iPhones getting sold and an entirely set of other problems. You'll note that 26.8% of them were either unlocked, easily guessable, or in one instance had the credentials there (compare shoulder surfing before stealing the phone).

> Of phones they won at auction (at an average of $18 per phone), the researchers found 49 had no PIN or passcode; they were able to guess an additional 11 of the PINs by using the top-40 most popular PIN or swipe patterns.

[nemothekid]

1. The Emergency card (the first user was contacted when the user's father's iphone was stolen).

2. You can read the phone number off the sim card

3. Many people upon losing their phone will set their phone to lost mode and include a number.

[flanked-evergl]

> 1. The Emergency card (the first user was contacted when the user's father's iphone was stolen).

Yet the father was the one being fished.

> 2. You can read the phone number off the sim card

How?

> 3. Many people upon losing their phone will set their phone to lost mode and include a number.

Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.

[nemothekid]

>Yet the father was the one being fished.

Not sure I understand. The father's phone was stolen, and the son was contacted, and the son logged into the account.

>How?

Anyone can pop out the sim card and plug it into any dumbphone, navigate to settings and read the phone number. I assume there's probably a USB device to dump data on a sim card.

>Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.

Your phone is lost until you attain the information that it was stolen. I fail to find it now, but there was a tiktok of a woman who lost their iphone at festival and it turned up in china where she also was unsuccessfully phished.

[codetrotter]

> Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.

Your phone could disappear and you would assume it fell out of your pocket or that you left it somewhere, when in fact someone could have stolen it from you while you were not paying attention.

And besides, most people probably don’t expect that a thief would respond and trick them into unlocking the phone for them. Instead the expectation might be that a thief would not respond, and that if someone responded they are a good samaritan trying to help you.