On Friday night I had my iPhone stolen. It was early in the evening and to put it simply, I just wasn’t paying enough attention. The next morning I went into the Apple store to report it stolen. The guy then informed me of something that quite simply BLOWS MY MIND.
Each iphone has a unique serial #. They have a complete database of those serial #s, tied to unique member accounts. They know the entire journey of that serial #. In summary: they know it’s your phone.
So if they were willing and you reported yours stolen they could EASILY block that serial # from activation - like many carriers do for Blackberry. BUT they won’t do it.
Why not? According to the Soho Apple store, because they make so much money off selling people new phones after theirs are lost/stolen. (!!!)
This is obviously a flawed logic because even if a person stole my phone and Apple refused to reactivate it, I would still have to buy a new one. So they’d STILL get a new phone sale out of me.
The reason why it is important for them to refuse to activate a stolen phone (and verify identity on all devices that are activated/reset) is that it discourages theft. Making it even a tiny bit harder would maybe make someone even slightly more unlikely to snatch up another person’s phone. Isn’t that worth it to Apple from a pure customer safety perspective alone? Don’t they want to do everything they can to protect their customers?
Passwords don’t provide much protection on the phone. If you enter it wrong 10x it simply resets and clears your data. Nice that your data is protected, but it certainly doesn’t protect the actual device. EVEN if a thief were bold enough to walk into an Apple store and say they didn’t know the password - the Apple store employee would unlock it, not ask for any ID to match up the serial # with the person, and would reactivate it on another person’s account - no questions asked.
THIS IS INFURIATING.
