Such considerations must incorporate public safety/crime considerations as well. Smartphones are often the most expensive thing we have on our person and became a huge target for thieves. Locking/bricking went a long way towards reducing this, and then limiting the value of resale parts did again.
Honestly I wish they would serial lock every single part of the phone possible. And then unlock them when you detach your apple account from it. Put up a message that says "This display is owned by another apple account" and refuse to function until it's removed or you contact the owner to have it unlinked.
Unless Apple is dealing with thefts at the factories before they make it in to a phone.
Technically they could do this already, it could just cause some bad publicity when people who got their phone 3rd party repaired wake up with a message that their screen is stolen.
We need systems, processes, and technologies which ensures the authenticity (provenance) of a supply chain.
Art, food, electronics, materials, clothing, malware, root kits, ad nauseam.
I've been reading about counterfeit, black market, and gray market goods for decades. Do not want.
If I pay $1,000 for a Gucci handbag, I want an authentic $1,000 Gucci handbag. (I have zero issue with knockoffs clearly labeled as knockoffs.)
Anti-consumer, anti-labor, anti-customer, anti-fairuse and pro-monopoly bullshit regiments like DRM, DMCA, inability to repair, and price gouging are orthogonal issues. We can have provenance without these shackles if we choose to reign in corporate power.
As for Apple in particular, they're not the worst, and have been getting better. Their phones and laptops are the most reliable and are becoming easier to repair (design and logistics). The terms of their Apple Care have gotten more generous (forgiving).
Spitballing, I'd say Apple is ~1/3rd of the way towards a healthy cradle-to-grave product lifecycle. They can and should do much better with 3rd party repairs. Like making authentic parts available at cost. Certifying repairs shops. Certifying technicians. Etc.
Source: I was a tech at an Apple Dealer as a kid. Our leads were trained and certified. Our parts were all authentic. My notions are based on experience, not some utopian fantasy.
If the device becomes unusable because it is marked as stolen, disassembling it for parts should not be economic.
One way to do this is spend MORE money to make sure every single part of the device is waste and MUST go to a landfill.
Another way would be to do the opposite, and make the spare-parts readily available for everyone to make the sum of parts less valuable.
The mainboard is already unusable because it's flagged as stolen, the rest of the parts should not be worth more than 60-70USD. But because some of the parts cannot be purchased at all, they are currently worth alot more
That’s not a good reason to do this. If you really wanted to do it that much you could just modify the real parts and that isn’t really a thing that happens anyway. What’s a far bigger concern is giving one company complete control over whether you can repair your own phone or not, creating a monopoly where they can charge whatever they want, and they might not even do it at all because they’d prefer you to buy a new one. This is actually happening to the average person, these theoretical attacks that serialisation doesn’t really protect against aren’t
Maybe you don't hear about it because it works and so no one attempts it
By the way long ago I got a screen repaired at an unofficial place, on an old iphone, and camera started working incorrectly (focusing issues etc). I kinda suspect they swapped the camera for a different one, if the phone warned me immediately that would have been cool. I heard many similar stories by the way.
