Find My iPhone + iCloud is what you're describing.

Even a DFU restore of the device won't help a thief, as the activation process will simply ask for your iCloud login and will display a "Message From Owner" that you can set at icloud.com indicating the device was stolen, making it much harder for someone to purchase and claim ignorance about the origins.

Can confirm. We ran into this problem in my company as we had contractors setup phones and turn on Find my iPhone. We ended having to do some not so great things to make it so we could use the devices again.

What not-so-great things?

y, that's true but I feel like Apple could do more so criminals don't even want to take iPhones, Apple could put things in place where they aren't worth anything on the secondary market. Basically unusable and could lead the cops to your house.

This way if you're on the subway you can have your phone out without worrying about getting robbed.

It your house gets robbed they would leave your phones because they can't be sold or reused.

They already are. You can sign in to your Apple ID, nuke your phone from orbit, put it in Lost Mode so that it can't be used for anything other than 911 calls, etc etc etc. And you can call your carrier, report it stolen, and bam - the ESN is blacklisted and the phone is a brick.

I'm guessing they are still useful for parts though? Screens, batteries, cameras....all of that still works even if the motherboard is disabled.

Sure, but the value of parts from a stolen device is much less than the value of a working device.

But the demand for parts is a lot higher than that for stolen phones.

You might not buy a phone from an internet cafe that sells 2nd hand phones, but you might buy a replacement screen from an internet cafe that does repairs.

As others note, it's already possible to remotely wipe/lock a stolen phone, and if you report it stolen to the carrier, they'll list the IMEI in a database shared to other carriers; many will refuse to activate/connect when their SIM is inserted into a phone with a known-stolen IMEI.

Short of visibly, physically destroying the phone, though, there's nothing you can do to prevent this. A criminal doesn't care that the phone is a brick; they'll sell it to someone and be miles away with the money before the buyer realizes the phone is useless.

Once it is reported stolen, it could capture the face of everyone who tries to access it. If you assign your police case number in iCloud, it could automatically send your police department these faces (with times and locations) to expedite recovery. With all the face databases popping up, they'll easily have a short list of people to follow up with.

Then again, this might create lots of other problems.

Find My iPhone has a feature called Activation Lock which matches up with what you're describing: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201365

The phone won't do anything until the person who turned on the lock turns it off again.

IIRC if "Find My iPhone" is enabled then the phone is worthless (except for parts)

Activation Lock does exactly what you want and already exists. If someone steals an iPhone associated with an iCloud account, it's completely useless to the thief.

> Apple need to create a system where stolen phones can be reported to them, Apple can then contact the owner/verify they are stolen. And then add them to a stolen list and disable calling/apps on those phones. And display an overlay on the screen THIS PHONE IS STOLEN.

Why would I want to give a third party the ability to brick my phone? If Apple has that power, then a disgruntled Apple employee can use that power and a government can compel Apple to use that power.

My computing devices are my computing devices. Only I should have the ability to do anything to them.