Because carrier-locked phones to major carriers don't suffer a severely depressed price. AT&T has high market share it doesn't matter enough if a phone is locked to AT&T to prevent theft and depress resale prices.
An unlocked phone is indistinguishable from a locked phone until you attempt to sign it up for another network. That distinction isn’t made until the phone is already stolen.
If I’m a thief, I steal the phone either way. Sometimes I get a carrier locked phone and only make $10 (realistically more. Carrier locked phones sell at a discount around 20-50%), or I get an unlocked phone and make $400.
Your argument is the same that carrying less cash would make you less of a target for pickpockets. It won’t. They will steal a wallet with no cash as fast as a wallet stuffed with hundreds.
If the average selling price of a stolen phone drops, the incentive to steal phones does so too.
> Your argument is the same that carrying less cash would make you less of a target for pickpockets. It won’t. They will steal a wallet with no cash as fast as a wallet stuffed with hundreds.
People don't tend to carry cash any more. And you know what has stopped happening as often as a result?
But what you are missing is that a carrier locked phone isn't worthless, it is worth quite a bit. A carrier locked iphone 14 sells for ~$400 on ebay, an unlocked one sells for ~$525.
The carrier lock mostly just affects the owner of the phone, and the resale value when they are done with it. In completely unshocking news, TMobile also has a program to buy back t-mobile phones, unlock them, and sell them on.
Stealing a $400 phone vs stealing a $525 phone is irrelevant to the thief.
What DOES stop thieves is activation and firmware locks. Phone theft is way down since Apple effectively made it impossible to use a phone that hasn't been logged out of. Those phones are only worth what their unlocked parts are worth, which is not that much.
> But what you are missing is that a carrier locked phone isn't worthless, it is worth quite a bit. A carrier locked iphone 14 sells for ~$400 on ebay, an unlocked one sells for ~$525.
A reduction in average selling price is a reduction in incentive to steal, full stop. I'm not sure how you can argue with that. I'm not stating it's 100% effective, I'm not stating that it's worth the cost, all I am saying is that it is a disincentive.
Because my belief is that the number of thefts doesn't exist on a relatively linear curve, which would have to be true for your position to be correct.
My bet is that stealing phones is more like a thresh-hold. Does this crime pay > $x? Then I will do the crime. In this case I suspect that $x is well below the selling price of an unlocked phone. There isn't a gradual dropoff, at least not in the region between $400-$520.
I could also argue that carrier locked phones could have a paradoxical increased effect on theft. If the expected value of stealing a phone is lower, the average thief needs to steal more phones to make the same amount of money.
Indeed. Anecdotally I’ve seen in a few places where the going rate for one carrier or another is actually a bit higher than unlocked because people aren’t that well-informed and think “I need a Verizon phone cuz I’m on Verizon.”
Which was pretty universally true in the USA 15 years ago.
Before Verizon stopped using pre-LTE, most unlocked phones wouldn't work on Verizon. I imagine you get burned by that once, and then you pay attention longer than necessary.
Ding ding ding, that's the key. There are some people who will mug you for any amount > $0.00. You can't make crime disappear by lowering the value. As that value drops, though, fewer and fewer people will bother as the risk/reward ratio shifts. You'll still have crimes from people desperately sick with drug addiction who need something, anything, to get more, and they're notoriously bad and risk/reward calculations anyway. You'll have fewer crimes from people who'd otherwise think, hey, let's go out and boost some phones for spending money.