Also what street level theif is rooting a phone? This is not a normal-person kind of operation

It is not completely invalid. This is a ridiculous statement.

The stats are actually pretty clear. T-mobile in particular got hit with plenty of fraud and others did too before they got better at locking things down.

Activation locks were also a control put in place to reduce what was for a while an epidemic of street crime where phones were stolen. The locks are critical and pretty popular, many DA's and cities demanded Apple put them in to try and reduce street crime - and they did.

So the idea that locks prevent theft / crime is not completely invalid. In fact, there are laws against stealing from houses and many people still lock their house. Their are laws against steeling cars and people still use keys for their cars.

> In fact, there are laws against stealing from houses and many people still lock their house. Their are laws against steeling cars and people still use keys for their cars.

It looks so unsecure. It will be much better if Apple will lock your house and car instead, so you will just ask Apple to unlock your house. If you violate Apple rules, e.g. by storing inappropriate content in your house, they will just ban you, so your city will be a much better place to live.

From working at a att store for a while, I'll say that there is far more fraud than most would think. Perhaps it was because I worked in a little bit of a poorer area, but we actively turned away 25-40% of customers on any given day out of suspicion of fraud. If a customer stopped paying for their phone we would have that commission taken back next month. Even with that many people being turned down you still lost a lot of commission every month.

This is more an indication that the problem is being solved at the wrong level of abstraction. The problem is that phone companies are handing out loans with no way to enforce collateral and without tying to some real persons credit. Being able to install your own OS on a phone is orthogonal to being able to use it as a secure collateral.

Well, you can once the phone is paid for. We could give out codes to unlock it from our network after that. Noone wants to buy phones outright or put money down, though. I agree you should be able to install whatever os you want once it's paid for as well, but I was under the impression that's a manufacturer thing not a carrier thing.