Apple, Activation Locks, and the Great Database in the Sky

2 points by vvoaterr 4 years ago | 2 comments

Go to eBay right now, and buy any Activation-Locked Apple device. It's OK, I'll wait.

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OK, now: try to use it to do something. Anything. Something as simple as write a NOTEPAD note, or play one song from iTunes.

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Nope! You are surely getting screenfulls of information telling you, this Apple device has been locked and only the original owner can unlock it.

I suppose this is to prevent people from stealing Apple devices and reselling them to pawn shops or on eBay and Craigslist, and it must be working. Soon even the most savvy thieves will know, don't even bother to try to steal an Apple device or a Tesla car, for as soon as you do it gets bricked from all the satellites in space.

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I'm writing this because I bought a nine year old iPad on eBay and have spent the last two weeks trying to get through to AL-SUPPORT Activation Lock support at Apple, asking them to unlock it. And of course they don't care, I am not the original owner of the device, and unless I am, it is as useless as a digital brick. Battery life, screen quality, beautiful craftsmanship of the item itself, nothing matters. It just sits there telling me I'm practically a criminal for even owning this device.

No matter that the original owner gave up on it long ago, when even the simplest apps like YouTube and Gmail stopped working on it, by design, intentional planned-obsolescence coming down from Apple themselves. With the iOS getting relentlessly updated every year, all the apps get forcibly recompiled and anything old just doesn't work any more at all.

They don't care about this device any more. It was just a real-world dongle they used to get information from and about the original owner, information they've got stored in their giant database in the Cloud. They don't really care about me at all.

and I can imagine the universe is littered with these devices, an Oort Cloud of them completely surrounding the planet, mentally bricked by the iOS updates and physically bricked by the Activation Locks, I'm a criminal for owning one, and were I to bring it to an Apple store to complain, they would have no useful help for me at all, "Buy a new one!" they'd tell me.

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Who is the problem here --- me, or Apple?

josephcsible 4 years ago |

There's a good chance that the iPad you bought was indeed stolen. Apple does a bunch of things that are really evil, but I don't think Activation Lock ranks very highly on that list.

fjhfhgf 4 years ago |

You, for ever buying apple.

Apple never disguised this. Their profit and lock in tactics are part of the plan from day one. Even during the magical time people insist on remembering wrong about the machintosh etc. It's never been about empowering users or playing nice with open standards, so yes the problem is certainly within yourself for being a deluded fool.