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.)
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.