This is exactly what goes wrong, way too many times. After encountering this issue with various friends and family, with locked iphones, I strongly believe we've gone wrong somewhere. People simply are not aware that their device is protected like this, until it actually hits them, which for way too many people, is simply "never". And in the case they are aware, they don't know how to remove the locks either.
Contacting the previous owner isn't as simple as it may seem, as iphones will typically obscure the owner's name. If the phone has passed any reasonable amount of hands, been locked in a closet for a few years, or was set up with another relative's account, disabling any of these kinds of locks is a losing game, usually ending up in frustration and the purchase of a new device anyway. Now consider what happens when workplaces discard devices en masse.
I completely agree with wanting good protection for my data on my devices, but people should be able to give away and sell these devices without worrying that the device will end up bricked in the process.
This is not an acceptable compromise. These devices are the keys to a person’s entire existence, no compromise should be made to offset the user’s ignorance.
It's like buying a car from someone who doesn't have the keys for it or any paperwork. Sure, it's not quite common knowledge like buying a car yet, but it will be eventually.
This is a really good point, but I'd like to counter with the observation that the anti-theft features of cars don't routinely brick products the way Apple does with activation lock.
However, a car parts are not molded like an Apple laptop. Most of them can be sold for good value.
> Responsible recyclers and refurbishers wipe the data from used devices before selling them on. In these cases, the data is wiped, but cannot be assigned to a new user, making them effectively worthless. Instead of finding these machines a second home, Bumstead and others are dismantling them and selling the parts. These computers often end up at recycling centers after corporations go out of business or buy all new machines.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201065
(to some of the commenters, note Step 2 carefully -- the rest of this guide is for older macs)
Ive worked with second hand devices for a long time. Ive had many come through that have activation/MDM/etc locks and have tried calling the IT dept they came from and all but about one time they pretty much just laughed at me or just played dumb about it entirely. Apple and other vendors were no help in this as they just tell you to contact the original owner.
But at the benefit of less-burdened security teams, and greatly enhanced peace of mind for users and info-sensitive organizations? You can argue it's taking something highly risky like security and shifting those man hours to something not as threatening.
As the sibling commenter points out, this should also result in less waste as those drives do not need to be destroyed if the device is properly unlocked.
It isn't necessary to destroy the physical media anymore, so that reduction in e-waste is fine with me. Just properly erase the device by clicking the button in settings.
Unless, cryptography itself is broken... which would bring much wider-scale problems than destroying information on old drives anyway.
The IT department has no idea what kind of password that user was using, and they have no idea what kind of valuable data is on that machine. If that user's password was just "password", that IT department is also going to end up in hot water if they didn't wipe the machine before handing it off to a third party when all that proprietary data ends up in the wrong hands.
If wiping the machine before getting rid of it is "extra work", then that IT department isn't doing their jobs to begin with.
Source: just wiped and sent back a MacBook Air to my old workspace. My colleague finished the macOS setup and logged in with their iCloud account. After resetting it again (to re-do the setup in the way they wanted) it was locked to my account. So not even installing macOS and logging in to iCloud will bind the machine to you.
Imagine doing that with a machine you bought second hand and the original owner can’t be reached anymore.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208987
"Other ways to disable Activation Lock"
"Activation Lock is disabled when you use the Erase All Content and Settings feature."
Apple confirms that the feature works exactly as I said and exactly as users expect. I've used it myself, and it does work.
Users running software that is several major versions out of date will have a more difficult experience, since that button did not exist, and they would have to first remove Activation Lock before going into Recovery Mode to manually format the Mac. Those are the remaining steps that were linked several comments up from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34505523
Apple has made the process as easy as it possible can be now, identical to the process used to factory reset an iPhone.
I’d argue if you can wipe it (which requires your iCloud account approval), install it as someone else, login with that new iCloud account, then reset it and it suddenly reverts back to the previous owner, something is wrong or very unintuitive.
The problem on Mac it seems is that there are two official ways to do it. One proper way (the “Erase All Content and Settings”) and one other way (the way we did it, boot into recovery and format it, then go through setup with another iCloud account which apparently just temporarily lets another user use the machine). On iPhone there is no user accessible recovery mode so that can’t happen there.
If you go through recovery, you can delete the content, but when you go to reinstall, you will be prompted for the credentials for the user tied to it.
Meaning, you can delete, but you can't reinstall without being prompted for authorization by the account that currently 'owns' that computer.
If you want IT asset disposition, it'll nominally cost you -- for pickup and processing, and optional value-adds like secure data destruction certificates. If the assets have remarket value, that can begin to subsidize the cost, easily zeroing it out, or even returning profit to the IT department. Recyclers are happy to pay IT departments to pick up their old Apple equipment -- and they know to ask ahead of time, "are these activation locked?"
These recyclers often have vertical integration on the refurbishing side, running an Amazon eCommerce department so they can directly capture that remarket value. And once they've got that going, their bottleneck to growth is how much material they can bring in -- which is never enough.
So the recyclers and refurbishers invariably need to buy material from other recyclers. There's an entire economy around selling pallet-fulls of used, minimally-inspected or completely "as is", Apple and PC equipment. Specialized invite-only communities exist for selling this material in bulk, with lots of overseas actors in on the game. Every R2 recycler is involved here, along with lots of actors from India and China in particular.
Having seen inside that sausage factory, fraud and theft is a legitimate problem. There's more than a fair share of "don't ask questions". More than a fair share of "yup we're definitely R2 certified, wink wink". More than a fair share of wining and dining the R2 auditors to get that certificate under the table in the first place.
I'm gonna go with the GP comment here -- the system is working as intended. Industrialized theft of this sort is much more eminently solvable through technological means than through overstretched law enforcement, especially when a non-negligible amount of material comes from overseas.
It's on the IT departments to figure out if they have enough time to activation-unlock their assets before disposition. Do they want to pay the recycler to pick up all that material, or do they want to sell the material and pad their budget?
A quick look at the Jamf documentation suggests it's pretty easy to mass unlock these devices, so I'm not buying that it's that much of a strain.
The activation lock removal is hardly an obscure hack, this is a process failure. Good on Apple for making these machines take their secrets to the grave.
I'm not sure you're being serious. Wiping a laptop before getting rid of it is SOP for a IT department. This is hardly a new requirement.
Again, the only people impacted are those who want to leverage their ability to take over a laptop without authorization.
If it’s a legitimate sale, the original recycler will require the seller to wipe/unlock the device or they will only give a steeply discounted price. If the seller is going to get hundreds/thousands less by not wiping the device, they will do it.
Thus, the only problem for recyclers is recycling stolen laptops.
I’m sure there are plenty of court precedents around bankrupt businesses trashing assets out of spite rather than selling them.
If the problem is the financial part, just go back to the person they bought it and get the money back.
If they're taking a risk and buying it legally from, for example, a police auction, or from someone who "might have forgotten to contact the owner": it's a risk.
If it was acquired illegally, I can't say they deserve a solution to their problem.
My last MacBooks were sold or refurbished by Apple.
Assuming you are referring to end of life process:
Apple's kit sold as refurb is done from their incoming returns — faulty, or otherwise unwanted, systems.
Everything sent to them as a trade-in isn't handled by Apple at all: it's contracted out to third-party companies. (This likely applies to their recycling programme also, but I've not looked into it)
At least: these things certainly used to be the case — and there have been a whole bunch of articles online that support this, over the years. I would love to see evidence to the contrary if things have changed?
— But like I said: I'm not sure I understand your comment, so maybe my points here are irrelevant.
It will prevent further theft if nobody made any profit.
> If you're using macOS Monterey or later on a Mac with Apple silicon or a Mac with the Apple T2 Security Chip, use Erase All Content and Settings instead of the remaining steps in this article.
So, it is literally a two step process for any Mac released since the end of 2017, and the first step is just an optional reminder to cancel or transfer your AppleCare coverage if you have any.
So, one real step. Wow, so hard.
> assuming that the seller is even aware
The buyer should make the seller aware of the problem, because it is in the buyer's interest not to end up with scrap.
But, regardless, why would the seller not want to wipe their computer first? The seller will inevitably hit the button mentioned in the help article simply because that's the only obvious way to wipe the computer to anyone who isn't super technical. This is a problem that practically solves itself for devices that aren't stolen.
Corpo6entities tend to be apathetic while most private owners are simply stupid.
How does this assume anything about the owner/seller?
It’s entirely on the buyer to make sure they’re getting what they want out of a transaction as long as the seller is not misrepresenting the product, and activation lock has been a thing for like a decade on Apple devices, so it should be widely known. If they make major purchases without even researching the bare minimum of what to look for, they will have a bad time regardless of activation lock. If the seller is misrepresenting the product as having the activation lock removed when it isn’t, that becomes a legal issue. On platforms like eBay, they will happily side with the buyer and refund them in cases like that. For B2B stuff, that’s why lawyers exist, but things can get messy.
If you're using macOS Monterey or later on a Mac with Apple silicon or a Mac with the Apple T2 Security Chip, use Erase All Content and Settings instead of the remaining steps in this article. For any other Mac or macOS, continue to step 3.
> use Erase All Content and Settings instead of the remaining steps in this article. For any other Mac or macOS, continue to step 3.
Nothing else is needed to disable activation lock.
Yes. And what is argued is that they should talk about stolen property. Because if they got the laptops legitimately they should ask the original owners to unlock them. If they can't or won't then something is suspicious. The laptops being stolen is the leading suspicion.
Then how do they know that they're not dealing in stolen goods? If they can't establish a chain of custody to a legitimate owner, then they're being irresponsible.
Did the owners just push the laptop under the door and run away? At the point where they receive the laptop they can say: "If the laptop is locked it will cost you $X to dispose it here. If it is unlocked we pay you $Y."
Set X and Y appropriately and people who can will unlock them.
In fact, there was a period of time when depending on latest os version and hw version, the steps changed.
The one time I bought a mac personally, the reseller tried to follow the correct procedure... But they used an outdated one. Contacting previous owner led to threats of litigation for phone call mobbing.
Things may have been more complicated before that, but Apple has made it as easy as it possibly can be now without telling thieves to just start grabbing every Mac they see.
"Erase All Content and Settings" did not exist in macOS Catalina. Back then, you had to manually boot into recovery and reinstall the OS that way, which unfortunately did nothing for Activation Lock, and was a confusingly advanced procedure to expect end users to perform. Now, someone just has to go into settings and click that button and macOS will handle everything.
I'm sorry but this is bullshit too.
I have sold my fair share of old Apple devices via so-called "responsible recyclers and refurbishers".
When submitting the form on the website, they all have statements in BIG RED CAPITAL LETTERS saying "please logout from Apple iCloud before sending us your device".
Most of them also have terms and conditions saying they won't pay out and/or will return devices where activation lock is still enabled.
Given Apple’s reluctance to sell spare parts, this isn’t a bad business.
The logic board is just one part. The keyboard, trackpad, lcd, battery and a few other boards have quite a lot of value.
Logic boards are fairly reliable in practice.
What’s going to suck is when you can’t build a Frankenstein laptop as Apple marries more and more parts together.
“Oh, this keyboard didn’t come with this lcd from the factory, no F key or red for you!”
All that will happen is that the second hand value of Apple devices will go down, because recyclers will assume X % are basically scrap.
In that case the value of the entire batch will be lower.
So yes it's a known issue. But for each individual MacBook, it's a potential issue.
Definitely a point in my book for buying Apple.
In the article they outline a pretty decent way to overcome this through apple themselves which I'd be much happier with.
It’s a safety measure against laptop thieves - if you steal a macbook you cannot resell it.
A process that no user has a reason to follow / sounds like spam.
And a 30 day timeout that suddenly makes stolen devices are worth something again.
The recyclers themselves need to it worth the owners time to unlock it…
The safe maker is unethical and just making waste!
Apple devices wouldn't sell at all if they tried to implement this kind of security.
Anecdotally, sometimes in my hometown I find dumps of bags from car thieves. I go through them and try to return the remnants to their respective owners. The thieves passed up things like a $5k engagement ring in a cloth bag and a startup founder's personal notes on proprietary technology just because they were not recognizable within 2 seconds as having value. Meanwhile, every single Apple device was gone. It was kinda 50/50 regarding Android phones, but laptops (especially corporately-allocated ones) are also always taken.
So if this really is such a dealbreaker, the thieves haven't noticed yet. Which means their fences haven't noticed yet. Which means their customers haven't noticed yet. Which means what you said is probably wrong, and probably there are ways around the activation lock that the authors of the article have somehow missed out on, or perhaps they're being sold/disassembled for parts.
By making the fence value of the products less, however, it definitely creates a disincentive to work hard to steal a laptop. If it is easy, ya, its gone, but otherwise, their are much better ways to earn those five bucks.
Plenty of companies don't care to unlock these properly before recycling and it's creating excessive waste.
E-waste is going to happen regardless and it would be more proper for Apple to have a computer recycling program, which already exists, or to turn the old computers into spare parts for repair.
Eliminating the potential for theft is a massive win. I remember what it was like before activation lock existed and how high of a target iPhones were. As soon as that feature came out the thieves were screwed out of a potential payday. Now we don’t have to worry about our phones being stolen.
Given that, removing the activation lock after notifying you with a 30/60/whatever day window to respond seems like a reasonable policy to me.
Not the same thing, depending upon how the authentication is handled.
I think it's perfectly fair for "legitamately acquired" to mean the original owner consented by unlocking the device. The peace of mind and security if you own a T2 device is the way it should be, and if you want to sell it, you just factory reset it, which is a quick process.
However, since Apple actually had full authority and cryptographic ownership of the chip, they can generate a key given serial number which will reset T2 contents.
Personally, I think the setup should be that you don't have to go to apple for it, but it should immediately wipe device identity and disk encryption then (and the disk should always be encrypted)
I don’t think that’s true, I’ve never had to do that, and this is not a part of Apple’s documented reset process for resale of a machine. If you are the device’s actual owner and you use the simple process Apple outlines, it will reset it for a new owner, period.
Been there, went with Apple support over it, the only reason I still don't have it unlocked is because I didn't have time or energy to redo the whole setup. Might redo the apple-driven unlock process, but the hw is not worth it really.
EDIT: Apparently the nice simpler procedure that does wipe FMM only arrived in Monterey.
Your information is outdated.
Any T2 Mac or newer requires only that button to be pressed, and then click through the wizard to complete the process.
You can also read this document: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208987
"Other ways to disable Activation Lock"
"Activation Lock is disabled when you use the Erase All Content and Settings feature."
which confirms the same thing. The experience that people have is very simple these days.
Which still leaves considerable amount of laptops with broken FMM registrations in T2. Especially since it was upgrading to Catalina, iirc, that started problems.
This is not true. The bankruptcy process attempts to recover as much value from assets as possible, and so creditors and the process should absolutely care to properly unlock in order to extract maximum value.
Similarly, aging out old equipment is still sold to make money, and unlocking should achieve more resale value.
The incentives are absolutely there. And the article does absolutely zero investigation as to where exactly there's a breakdown in incentives or communication, or if it's even a major issue at all. Maybe the process is working 99% of the time.
If bankcrupt, the original company may have a duty to unlock them because they will be worth more.
> “Previous owners do not return phone calls“
It’s one thing to forward a request. But to give unlock after 30 days? That’s gonna be abused by thieves and unscrupulous refurbishers
There is exactly that pathway. If you have the consent of the original owner, which I think is an important and required quality of "acquired legitimately", you can have the original owner remove the device from their Apple account remotely, or to wipe the device and reset it while logged in prior to physically handing it over to you.
If neither of these things have happened, on what basis do you believe the complaintant has "acquired legitimately"? Is consent of the original owner not important in your view?
You want to bet? Theres a large body of non technical users.
1. You buy and traffic in stolen goods, you're a fence. Good thing you got fucked.
2. You don't do a good job of operationalizing your core business, and ensuring that sellers unlock devices before handing them over. Good, you suck at business and those that don't should rise to the top.
I don't see how any of this is a negative, except the environmental impact at the end, which considering most of this is aluminum and recyclable, is minimized and an acceptable trade-offs for the massive anti-theft and data protection benefits.
Hotel reservations, check-in and check-out are done online, tickets are online, etc.
How do you travel without using anything digital?
On one hand you have your phone for solving some basic problems, on the other you have to be near reasonably reliable internet constantly, with backup devices and contingency plans for them.
That, I do occasionally find myaelf the opportunity to be completely without digital stuff, and find them quite relaxing.
Even day to day living stationary, I have a hard time accepting that not being able to escape is a requirement, but I'm not really responsible for any critical systems, and am not paid like that either.
From TFA, which you clearly did not read:
> Often the previous owners are corporations or schools who buy and sell the machines in bulk and aren't interested in helping recyclers or refurbishers unlock them. "Previous owners do not return phone calls, and large corporations that dump 3000 machines assume they have been destroyed, so it is critical we have a solution that does not depend on the previous owner approving,” Bumstead said. “And after all, we have property rights, so the original owner is not the current owner and does not technically have a right to condemn to death what is no longer their property."
Do you think this is accidental? Think again.
You clearly did not read, or comprehend, the quote you just pasted in here. This is someone committing fraud against the companies paying them to destroy decommissioned computer systems, something they may be legally obligated to do for compliance reasons. They're trying to make a buck on the backend instead of doing what their customers paid them to do.
I read, and comprehended the article, did you?
From the HN guidelines [1]:
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article."
> From the HN guidelines [1]: "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article."
Is this supposed to be funny or ironic? I find it's neither.
> From TFA, which you clearly did not read:
It’s a fair comment and callout in response.
Clearly didn't read the article. They receive shipments of 1000s from corps, who don't bother to remove the ownership.
They received shipments that the corporations thought were /destroyed/, likely legally required for compliance purposes, and they are participating in a fraud that violates compliance regulations by attempting to recycle rather than destroy these systems. The reason they don't want to contact the corporations to remove the activation lock is because the company doesn't know the systems were not destroyed, which is a quote from the person interviewed, in the fine article, which I read and clearly comprehended more than you.
This is a business participating in fraud and assisting people who steal electronics and they are upset that their business model has been disrupted. Good. Fuck them.
Also from the HN guidelines [1]: "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article."
Except when I get activation locked out of my own devices that I bought directly from Apple, which does happen from time to time. Fortunately, that's never happened while traveling, but if it did, I'd be in trouble. Getting it removed is a pain and can take a while.
Why does it happen? I don't know. Apple doesn't know. Nobody knows. Maybe they just really like talking to me and reviewing my receipts.
How do you know? On what basis do you make this claim?
Only with the consent of the original owner can you legitimize the transfer of property, and the activation lock is the exact technical means to get that consent and legitimize that transfer.
I thought this too until I had an iPhone stolen last year.
Coordinated rings target music festivals and I’d imagine enough people’s phones AREN’T activation locked that it’s worth it to them.
Apparently they ship the locked ones to China for scrap now. And that’s exactly where mine phoned home from he final time.
Any legitimate reseller would not have an issue because the original owner which sold the laptop to them would have wiped the device and removed the activation lock. The fact stolen goods end up as scrap and have no useful value beyond scrap value is not only okay with me, I think it's a net positive for society and one of the best things Apple has done for their customers and the world.