[vvoaterr]

Regarding ridiculously-expensive Apple heirloom tools: 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. All thieves everywhere must know by now, 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.

I imagine the universe is now littered with these devices, an Oort Cloud of them completely surrounding the planet, mentally bricked by annual iOS updates and physically bricked by 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'll tell me, "that's our company policy!"

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

[minimaul]

Depends.

If it was stolen from the original owner then you don't really own the device legally and this is the anti-theft part of activation lock functioning as designed. If you're an innocent third party to the original theft, your remedy is to get a full refund.

If it was just because the original owner forgot to disable activation lock, you should be chasing them to unlock it for you. If they refuse, your remedy is to get a full refund.

edit: reputable recycling places require you to have disabled activation lock on functional devices, or they don't pay out.

[xapata]

I've got a bizarre situation in which an OS upgrade bricked my Mac. I can't remember the details now, but it was something about an interface change in which I had managed to activate 2FA, but the login interface didn't have an input box for it.

The device was old enough that I just heaved a sigh and gave it to Apple for recycling.

[dylan604]

> It just sits there telling me I'm practically a criminal

I mean, you bought stolen goods. The law says you are culpable to some degree. If this was a legit sale, the original owner would be willing to do what's needed to make it useable.

[vvoaterr]

The original owner dropped it off somewhere when his YouTube app stopped working, which probably happened years and years ago.

[aimor]

What do you want exactly, for people to have the right to repair the products that they own? Ridiculous! It can't be done!