> They send them to countries where they aren't locked

iphones will remain locked regardless of what country they're in. I presume you're talking about states who are seemingly unwilling to pursue/prosecute claims of theft?

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kotaKat 2 hours ago | parent [-]

there's still a fairly lucrative parts stripping market and there are extreme efforts that are used to "unlock" locked devices - it has been known in the Chinese marketplace that you could get paired chips to do SMD rework with a "clean" set of identifiers. they'll swap the SOC, the flash, and the wireless all for a few bucks.

older iOS devices as well are also vulnerable to having their syscfg rewritten via exploits, so you can "clean" a locked device that way as well with a good set of serials. Apple Watches are a hot one for this.

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hparadiz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

On top of that a sizable percentage of theft victims don't even bother to report it stolen.

	▲	throwaway27448 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You can't activate the hardware with a different ID regardless. It requires the owner to relinquish ownership. I'm sure this is different with different components of course depending on how granularly apple tracks their hardware—but the whole package certainly can't be activated.