Maybe designed to help with anti-theft? I already use a shortcut automation when airplane mode is turned on to lock my phone and turn off airplane mode, as that’s the first thing thieves would do.
You can just disable access to Control Center and Siri when locked. If you have an eSIM device, this is a really great thing to do, as it’ll always connect to a cellular network when available.
How is this shortcut even possible? Maybe it’s because I have an older model or haven’t figured out how to build good Shortcuts yet, but I thought that every shortcut requires some kind of manual activation. Would you launch the shortcut from an Apple Watch? Wouldn’t iOS require confirmation from the thief to turn off airplane mode?
That being said, I have heard of a weird automation someone made where it would open an app as soon as they went to the Home Screen. It took some thinking for them to deactivate it because the shortcut was really fast to activate.
I see how to build it now, thank you. I imagine for this automation to serve its purpose, we also need to make the Control Center inaccessible when the phone is locked so that whoever has the phone can’t just try turning it off again. Well, that isn’t strictly necessary since the automation seems to run anytime Airplane Mode is enabled.
This is a great idea. Perhaps add a moderate delay (say 30 seconds or 1 minute) to confuse them even more. Then they will think that airplane mode is active when it isn't.
When you say theft, do you mean by someone with interest in the hardware or the data? Assuming hardware, I'm not sure I understand why a thief who intends to wipe it anyway would care about an auto restart versus normal screen lock. Assuming data, that's exactly what the article is about.
Are thieves really even stealing phones anymore? You can't pawn or sell them anymore because they can't just be reset and setup with a new account, batteries are becoming impossible to remove...all you can really take is the screen which isn't really worth much either.
Obviously, the logic board is locked to the owner's Apple account, but so is the display, battery, camera, and selfie camera. Basically the only thing you can reuse is the metal frame of the phone.
Phones are still stolen (since the cost of theft is $0) but stolen phones are worth closer to $5 than $1000.
> Phones are still stolen (since the cost of theft is $0) but stolen phones are worth closer to $5 than $1000.
I have read that there are services offered by specialized criminals to unlock stolen iPhones. These basically amount to phishing schemes where they trick the owner into entering their apple ID and password on a site under their control.
They can then factory reset the iPhone, but they also get to mine the phone/account for crypto, banking details, identity theft, etc.
Potentially the value of a stolen iPhone can be more than the aftermarket price, since draining a bank account has unbounded gain.
Low level thieves are getting $300-$600 for stolen phones.
> I know mobile networks keep lists of stolen devices, but they can't be used at all? Like all possible recovery modes demand authentication?
Newer phones for, I want to say maybe the last 5 years, yeah.
If it's turned off and you don't have the code to boot it, you can't access any kind of bootloader or recovery mode, it just shows a screen with an obfuscated email that is required to unlock it or something similar.
Gone are the days of just being able to do a factory reset.
Personally I only use it for battery savings when camping or similar. It's not the kind of thing everyone cares about. I think we're long past the days where a flight full of phones frantically searching for towers during takeoff/landing would degrade the network for people on the ground, as may have been true way back when (and why) airplane mode was adopted as a standard feature.
I have to think that if mobile phones presented an actual interference threat to aircraft avionics systems they simply would not be allowed on board. You cannot assume that all the passengers will follow the instructions to turn them off/disable the radios.
It was never about that. It’s about interference with aircraft systems.
Look for “5G NOTAM” if you are someone who thinks this is bunk. Specifically, some radio altimeters (which are needed for some IMC approaches) can be interfered with by the adjacent 5G frequency bands due to not being built with a tight enough filter.
The 5G issue was more about flying in or over anywhere that had a 5G service using that particular band - it didn’t matter whether anyone on the phone did or did not have a phone on.
Hence the whole US aircraft fleet was upgraded (by the end of September 2023) so that band could be used for 5G there and it’s no longer a problem.
As I understand it, cellular modems wouldn’t transmit on a frequency if they can’t see a base station (tower) first on that channel, so I expect before the problem was fixed, the temporary solution was just to disable that band at the base stations.
If there was any actual known or suspected risk of electromagnetic compatibility issues with any consumer devices, there would be very strict laws about it (it might become a Federal offence not to have your phone in airplane mode, for example - but obviously it’s not)
We can further caveat that it wasn't "anywhere that had a 5G service" since the radio altimeter is not needed except on low visibility approaches into an airport.
Either way, it's about interference with aircraft systems from cellular infrastructure/devices. Certainly, if a tower talking on 5G can interfere with a radio altimeter, a bunch of cellphones onboard could do the same thing or even amplify the effect.
> it might become a Federal offence not to have your phone in airplane mode, for example - but obviously it’s not
Violating directions from the flight crew can be a federal offense. There is a chain of authority from the FAA to the airlines and to the PIC. The airline and PIC delegate part of that authority to the rest of the crew. Unless you are very aware of every regulation and particular company policy, I highly recommend that you don't test this.
Cellphones used to operate on a frequency band that was very close to the same band used by ground proximity warning systems, so theoretically they could interfere with the safety systems on a plane. Modern phones use different frequency bands now.
I typically activate airplane mode twice and have it fail. Remember the automation, go deactivate the automation and then airplane mode works. On actual airplanes, I’m more likely to simply power off my phone.
When people say things like this what they're actually doing is falsely associating walkable urban fabric in cities like San Francisco, NYC, and large parts of Chicago as being especially dangerous just because it's only practical to be pick-pocketed on foot.
They say this while ignoring the generally low crime rates of those compared to peers. For example, Chicago has an almost 20% lower property crime rate than Peoria, IL. Fort Worth, TX has 52% higher property crime rate than New York City. Carmel, Indiana, an affluent suburb with a public high school ranked #354 in the country and 6th in Indiana, only manages to have a 28% better property crime rate than NYC.
(And driving a car around is a lot more statistically dangerous to your life than walking around a big city. I'd rather have my phone stolen than be t-boned by a drunk driver)