It goes to scrap if the previous owner didn’t erase it properly. If you do a proper erase, it can be used by a new person with no prob.

It’s a safety measure against laptop thieves - if you steal a macbook you cannot resell it.

It's also a remarkably effective e-waste creation program. But I don't see the sense in creating more (probably poorly controlled) e-waste as a solution to this problem.

Thieves eventually learn not to steal worthless bricks.

> In the article they outline a pretty decent way to overcome this through apple themselves which I'd be much happier with.

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…

I bought a locked safe and the previous owner didn't give me the combination.

The safe maker is unethical and just making waste!

A safe has a pretty extremely effective security feature that prevents the kinds of thievery at the scale of Apple devices: namely, mass. A secondary contribution of course comes from the tendency to be placed deep inside a building.

Apple devices wouldn't sell at all if they tried to implement this kind of security.