Activation Lock is only available[2] on Intel Macs with a T2 chip, or Apple Silicon Macs. All of these machines support erase all content and settings.
1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102664 2. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102541
Did you also have to enter your user name?
Note that you’re getting a strong response because you concluded intent from N = 1 anecdote.
No, it was prefilled.
It’s your word vs. my experience and Apple’s docs. If I’m wrong, it’s really easy for you to demonstrate this.
Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iphone. It's the first google search result from "how do I reset my iphone". It works 100% of the time and is so simple my mom figured it out on her own.
That's a fair point! It isn't the only one that was made.
OP concluded that the activation lock "only exists to create ewaste and pad the bottom line" [1]. That's the contentious part.
I'm not going to repro this because it takes a while to set up my dev env.
But it obviously reduces the reward for stealing devices, which probably reduces crime? If a thief, given the opportunity to steal my iPhone or an Android phone, takes the Android phone because it’s easier to fence - I’ll gladly give Apple money to be part of that group.
It doesn't reduce crime, it just shifts it to easier targets.
Instead of figuring out why people commit crimes and making society work better to eliminate those reasons, we just shift the burden around and make things objectively worse for everyone.
I get that this is a super hard problem, one that likely can't ever be 100% solved, and Apple isn't responsible for it, but it frustrates me that everything is about controlling symptoms, never about curing the disease.
"Convincing everyone in the world to not commit crime" isn't a reasonable ask. What Apple did is actively working.
“Stolen mode” isn’t really a thing with Activation Lock; Apple correctly assumes that the average victim of theft isn’t alert enough to flip some switches in iCloud.
Thieves know that iPhones are useless - now even more so - in their default state, and can only be removed from that state with deliberate action from the legitimate owner.
That has real life value, and so your accusation that it “only exists to pad the bottom line” is wrong.
This doesn't mean the theft lock feature itself doesn't have a purpose, just that making it confusing to remove was intentional to decrease hardware reuse.
Send them a locked device, they’ll send it back because it’s unsellable.
No legit place is buying locked devices. Which means they don’t sell them.
Of course you are. If anyone except the original owner can remove the lock, it’s more valuable to a thief. (Same if the owner can be tricked into removing it or do so accidentally.)
You'd be surprised how much e-waste theft creates. Often only a few parts can be sold off or reused, much better to prevent the theft.
What leads you to conclude intent?
Happens as part of the flow to erase a phone too, which anyone who knows anything about tech would go through.
I’d consider it a massive failure on Apple’s part if logging out removed ownership locks.
You’re concluding intent based on a process being confusing to you. That’s a massive and untenable leap. Like, repairing a toaster or building a rocket is complicated and can be confusing—that doesn’t prove conspiracy.
Not log out of session but log out and wipe in the reset device menu. If it's confusing to me it's at least this confusing to the average person which in my opinion explains the piles of not stolen activation locked ewaste. The outcome of a process is its intent if it's not changed.
I might want (and have wanted) to reinstall macOS and start fresh without any intention of relinquishing or transferring ownership of the physical device. And I might want to log out of iCloud because I don't want to sync my personal stuff on that computer anymore, or because something funky is happening with how messages or photos are syncing and I just want to reset it all. I'd be pretty pissed if, six months after reconfiguring everything, someone nabbed my laptop and I discovered that activation lock had been automatically disabled for me the whole time without my explicitly doing so.
Given these mutually irreconcilable user expectations, I can see why Apple would opt for a design that favors the more cautious approach where you have to press a very specific sequence of buttons to disable the lock. Maybe I'm just selfish, but knowing a laptop I sent away couldn't be repurposed but ended up as e-waste would make me feel a little guilty, but knowing a laptop I didn't want to lose got stolen with all my stuff on it exposed to the thief would make me apoplectic with rage.
Last month I reset my device to reinstall macos and selected log out of icloud and wipe. I assumed this would remove the activation lock but it did not and I had to put my password in. I've found that removing activation lock is an intentionally confusing and misleading process. This only exists to create ewaste and pad the bottom line.