Hardwares doing its job; locking unauthenticated users out of it. Unfortunately, this is a consequence of not understanding how to use it and you not using it.
I wish Apple was more informative about the risk of not using Find My, but this is software doing a good thing. The reason why Macs become bricks is because 9/10 of the times they’re stolen. And guess what? You’re not getting past Activation Lock. Really good deterrent.
Sorry this happened to you, but this is Apple doing a good thing and something I wish more manufacturers did.
Activation Lock is in fact not a good software because Apple have the keys.
If they refuse to accept the responsibility that comes with owning the keys, which, basically comes down to helping the customer when they can authenticate him, they should not own the key at all. At least they could be honest when they say they can’t do anything.
Because, reading this post, my question is not "why Apple don’t help?" but rather "why did we give them our keys if they are not willing to use them to help us ?"
What is a more legitimate use case than OP simple case that justify Apple’s decision power over Activation Lock.
> If they refuse to accept the responsibility that comes with owning the keys, which, basically comes down to helping the customer when they can authenticate him, they should not own the key at all.
Apple has a process to remove Activation Lock with proof of purchase documentation:
It doesn't matter why it failed. Apple decided not to fulfill their responsibility in this case, for whatever reason, so I agree with the GP that Apple should not be trusted with the key.
Yes, because clearly whatever someone said in an HN comment is the full story and nobody would ever lie or distort to reap karma among a community of knee-jerk Apple-haters.
"Assume good faith." "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The process works. I once got a MacBook issued from work that didn't have DEP or any MDM, so I did enroll it in Find My / Activation Lock. When I returned it I thought I had removed the lock, but there's a bit of a misleading option to remove a device (until it checks in again) from Find My that doesn't disable the lock. So work tried to contact me through a colleague, failed, and when I called back they already had the Apple reseller do it for them.
It’s not a good thing to lock out users who are clearly and demonstrably the owners of a device. Automated protections are good, but there should be procedures in place to handle cases like these.
That's great in a world where people are unable to resell devices, but the concept of "ownership" is fluid in a world where users can sell their devices. I can think of many scams that could abuse a system where anyone who presents an ID associated with a receipt can claim "ownership" of a device and bypass various security measures. Keep in mind, Apple's threat vectors range from "random phone thief" to "state level actors", with equally as varied clientele.
Still, Apple chose to keep the keys of Activation Lock although they could have made an autonomous system that they could not disable themselves.
By keeping a copy of the keys, they are also getting the responsibility to use them when the owner needs them because if they don’t, it raises serious concerns as to why they keep the keys in first place.
The problem is that you can't permanently disable it.
To me, the risk of something like what happened to OP is more concerning than being able to lock a thief out of using/reselling my laptop. So I'd prefer to just disable Activation Lock entirely, and prevent it from ever being enabled. Of course, the ability to do that essentially reduces the theft deterrent somewhat, so Apple wouldn't want to implement this ability.
If somebody has POSSESSION of the Mac, and either:
1. An Apple ID registered with the Mac
2. A proof of purchase
3. A court ruling establishing them as the owner.
Presume they are the owner.
Regarding state level actors, they are not interested in stealing people’s MacBooks, they are interested in stealing peoples Data. Removing the activation lock from a Mac != exposing the data on it. Regarding common thieves, see above.
If Apple isn’t confident that they can authenticate ownership, they have no business locking out Macs. It is really not as hard to authenticate ownership as you think though in cases where the person claiming ownership has possession of the Mac.
And the owner could have sold it and stolen it back in in the many months he have bought it. I guess if you manage to block the device in the store itself, they will unblock it for you - but it would defeat the purpose in this case.
They have to work on the balance of probabilities though. It would be very long odds to sell a device, steal it back, then need to approach Apple for help unlocking.
They can't rely on the odds, because scammers would step in and increase the odds if the possibility existed to exploit Apple's behavior. IMO, this is what should happen given that Activation Lock is enabled.
It's a separate question whether the customer should be able to disable Activation Lock before it gets tripped, which would prevent the computer from bricking itself. Apple makes that choice for the customer because they don't fully respect your ownership of the device that they made.
A police report made before or right around when the activation lock was implemented could be a pretty good indication on whether or not it's been stolen.
This sounds terrible, but there are some lingering issues which don't sit right:
If this person has their original invoice/receipt. Then it's trivial to show that this is not an item which requires that duties be paid. He's clearly not buying it twice. Agreeing to pay duties for something that was bought inside of the country, or already delivered to the country at the time of sale raises a red flag on this story. (Like why aren't they claiming the duties back now?)
The second issue is that Apple are pretty good about unlocking devices when the owner has their purchase paperwork (invoice/receipt) because this contains the serial number and the owners name. If that doesn't work for some reason (e.g. Apple have information that the device was sold or legitimately owned by someone else), then the owner can turn to further resources to prove ownership, including the documentation that shows that it was a missing item, a police report, an insurance claim, a notarised witness statement and so on. It's not as simple as "computer says no".
Altogether there seems to be more to this story. Has the other person meddled with the laptop? The author seems to have some suspicions that the other user attempted to make good with it - that seems like the source of his woes.
> The author seems to have some suspicions that the other user attempted to make good with it
This seems like something that should be extremely easy for Apple to see. If the data aligns completely with thr story OP tells, why won’t they help him?
Nobody is saying it’s bad for Apple to lock unauthenticated users out of a device.
The problem is Apple equating the completion of not just an on-boarding process, but an optional on-boarding process, with ownership. It’s that they have a feature to lock users out of their Mac but no procedure to actually bypass this lock for the legitimate owner of the device. Without such procedures, they should not have implemented such a lock.
I’m not even against Apple applying locks that they cannot break, such as with their enhanced security for iCloud, but the difference there is that Apple legitimately doesn’t control the keys, and that can only result in mere data loss rather than resulting in devices being totally bricked.
Hardwares doing its job; locking unauthenticated users out of it. Unfortunately, this is a consequence of not understanding how to use it and you not using it.
I wish Apple was more informative about the risk of not using Find My, but this is software doing a good thing. The reason why Macs become bricks is because 9/10 of the times they’re stolen. And guess what? You’re not getting past Activation Lock. Really good deterrent.
Sorry this happened to you, but this is Apple doing a good thing and something I wish more manufacturers did.