It all comes down to a lack of education, according to Schindler. You might be wondering why thousands of iCloud-locked iPhones end up at refurbishers in the first place. This reduces the supply of refurbished devices, making them more expensive-oh, and it’s an environmental nightmare. That seems like a nice way to thwart tech thieves, but it also causes unnecessary chaos for recyclers and refurbishers who are wading through piles of locked devices they can’t reuse. In other words, they won’t be able to do much with it besides scrap it for parts. But if you forget, and sell your old iPhone to a friend before you properly wipe it, the phone will just keep asking them for your Apple ID before they can set it up as a new phone. When you’re getting rid of an old phone, you want to use Apple’s Reset feature to wipe the phone clean, which also removes it from Find My iPhone and gets rid of the Activation Lock. With the release of macOS Catalina earlier this fall, any Mac that’s equipped with Apple’s new T2 security chip now comes with Activation Lock-meaning we’re about to see a lot of otherwise usable Macs heading to shredders, too.Īctivation Lock was designed to prevent anyone else from using your device if it’s ever lost or stolen, and it’s built into the “Find My” service on iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. Those iPhones, which could easily be refurbished and put back into circulation, “have to get parted out or scrapped,” all because of this anti-theft feature. “We receive four to six thousand locked iPhones per month,” laments Peter Schindler, founder and owner of The Wireless Alliance, a Colorado-based electronics recycler and refurbisher. Every month, thousands of perfectly good iPhones are shredded instead of being put into the hands of people who could really use them.
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