They are still a target for theft

https://www.economist.com/interactive/britain/2025/08/17/the...

> More recently London has become known as the “phone-snatching capital of Europe”. If the victims manage to track their devices, the goods are most likely to turn up in China.

> Globalisation created the supply chain that allows each iPhone—assembled from nearly 3,000 components—to reach the hands of a consumer. The same forces inverted see that phone yanked out of it, re-exported and broken apart again.

I wouldn't personally trust the Economist with this kind of thing, at least not compared to publications by technically-minded experts that have been shared elsewhere on this thread, such as the Register. The phone-snatching is real, but the effectiveness of this theft in creating usable spare parts, or of the efficacy Apple's software in reducing said theft, is much harder to determine.