Apple's antitheft solution has affected both, Gurry says. In both cases, one of two things happens to these used devices: those phones are either refurbished and resold, or broken down and sold for parts and scrap. People donate used or broken devices through programs like Cell Phones For Soldiers, or Mindful eCycling's own trade-in business. Gurry's company is one of many that handle the less glamorous side of a smartphone's lifecycle, the one where old devices are put out to pasture or spruced up before going to a new owner, often in a different country. 'We're going in the opposite direction of where our society needs to go to effectively handle the millions of devices our society produces.' 'The net result is that instead of that device being put back into the stream of commerce, it's destroyed, and the parts are recycled as best they can,' says Eric Gurry of reuse and recycling company Mindful eCycling. Some have been left with piles of non-functioning devices - a problem that's expected to get worse as the next wave of trade-ins begins, and millions of older devices are cycled out.

Politicians in cities like New York and San Francisco where that crime is the worst, and who had been hounding companies like Apple to offer extra protection, praised it immediately. Users also felt a sense of security in that their phones became a little less valuable to thieves.īut in the time since the feature was released to consumers last September, it's also managed to gum up the operations of legitimate companies that buy and resell iPhones and iPads. For iOS device owners (though mainly those with iPhones), it's a free layer of security that ensures thieves - or anyone else who finds your phone - can't do much with it. Enable it, and you need to provide that specific Apple ID and password to erase and reactivate an iOS device. Around 3.1 million Americans had smartphones stolen last year, or about double the year before, according to a recent study conducted by Consumer Reports.įacing increasing scrutiny, Apple introduced a new security feature as part of iOS 7 last year called iCloud Activation lock. Easy to snatch, and just about as simple to resell elsewhere for hundreds of dollars, these products became prime targets for thieves. And as the markets for smartphones and tablets grew, so did crimes that involved those products. When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, it not only created a non-stop stream of money for itself, but also for thousands of other companies.

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