Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:
Thieves have raided the fifth Bay Area Apple Store in less than two weeks, grabbing around $50,000’s worth of display products in less than 30 seconds.
It’s also the fourth time than this particular store has been robbed
And:
Display devices are automatically rendered useless once they leave the store Wi-Fi, but it may well be that thieves are able to sell the devices to people who fail to check them, or that they are broken for parts.
First, I loved the use of the word fortnight in the headline. Made me smile.
Trying to wrap my head around the money trail here. Is there an iPhone parts black market? If so, there’s got to be a lab somewhere where they pull these phones apart. Are the parts that lucrative?
Is it possible the thieves have some way to defeat the Apple security measures and are reselling the devices?
And, finally, this is the fourth time this store has been robbed. Need someone watching the front door for people in cinched hoodies. Maybe some machine learning to watch the front door, ring an alarm if it can’t detect a face.
“Black market” implies illicit activity, but aftermarket iPhone repair is a legitimate industry. How parts are obtained for those repairs is another matter. Macrumors published a great article about the iPhone repair industry, including how parts from broken iPhones are refurbished at premium prices. No reason this could not be applied to stolen iPhones.
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/08/14/inside-the-iphone-repair-ecosystem/
Or, you know, the police could do their job…
Considering the insane prices Apple charges for out of warranty repairs, and the infamous dodginess of knock off replacement parts, yes, genuine apple parts are a reasonably valuable commodity.
But somehow I don’t think that’s the answer. When I first heard about these thieves, and about the auto-bricking protection that Apple puts on their display models, I knew that either an ex-Apple employee is part of the gang, or else they have a hacker on board – one way or another, they’ve found a way to bypass the bricking. Otherwise the risk-reward ratio just seems wrong.
They do have security at the door. Unarmed and not to interfere with thieves, only call 911. Apple would rather lose this merchandise than have gunfire or injuries. Not all these thieves are smart, they may know this is Apple’s policy, but not be all that aware of the uselessness of the phones. Or some insider knows how to bypass this and is in on it.