Your wallet is protected by the other person not having a knife. Your cell phone's data is protected by the other person not being willing to use their knife to cut off one of your fingers. ;-)

Muggers are still stealing iOS devices, which people can just permanently brick via iCloud now, so I wouldn't expect that level of foresight!

Parts are parts and iOS devices have a lot of non-commodity parts that can't get "bricked".

I was under the impression we don't have international blacklisting, so there's still money to be made shipping handsets abroad?

Nope. TouchID doesn't work with a dead finger. Has to be alive.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/16/why-a-disembodied-finger-...

I wasn't really being serious. But in practice such liveness sensors are incredibly easy to defeat.

Can you prove that for TouchID specifically? You have to defeat both capacitance and RF sensors, btw. And remember, it needs to be "incredibly easy" by the standards of random unhinged violent criminals stupid enough to commit two felonies in order to secure a phone which will be completely useless within the 60 seconds or so it takes the victim to sign in with his Apple ID and brick the phone. Any bank accounts present on the device would also be nearly-instantly disabled.

By the time you defeat TouchID, the device will be useless anyway. It's more than secure enough.

To be fair, if I've just lost a finger, it will take me considerably longer than 60 seconds to disable the phone.

Except for when it works with glue

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/09/chaos-computer-club-hac...