Unbricking my MacBook took an email to Tim Cook

I&#x27;m glad the machine was restored to usable condition, I&#x27;ve had a laptop stolen from me in the past, it was returned in an evidence bag, in about 1000 pieces, which was very frustrating to get an excited call a year after it&#x27;d happened telling me the police had recovered it, only to be greeted with, well, an unusable husk.<p>That said, yours is a completely artificial problem imposed upon you by the company you made a purchase from. You don&#x27;t have the private keys to your own device, which means ultimately, your usage of that device is conditional on being in the good graces of a group of very wealthy, indifferent, strangers.<p>That, in, and of itself, is the issue at hand here, and while you&#x27;ve found yourself a favorable outcome, you&#x27;re likely an exception to the rule.

Whenever I have an issue with a product that support can&#x27;t&#x2F;won&#x27;t resolve I go to one of those sites where you can buy contact info and purchase the CEO&#x27;s email addresses and phone numbers then go at them. I just had to do it for the recent Google class action payout (got me my check overnighted).<p>I did it with Cash App though and it backfired (&quot;Your account has been terminated for contacting employees outside of the support system&quot;)<p>Now, how much is Sundar Pichai&#x27;s cellphone number going to cost me? I just want to get into my Google account that I have the username, password and recovery email for, but not the old phone number.

Why I don&#x27;t buy MacBook for personal use anymore:<p>- in 2019 spent more than €3K to buy the best macbook 15&#x27; available (&gt; 2 months of average salary in my Europe country)<p>- 2 weeks before the warranty (1y) the spacebar broke, the SPACEBAR!!!. It was a design issue and it got replaced in a few days by the local service under warranty.<p>- 1 year later, the battery starts dying out. Go to the authorized repairer and it was going to cost me ~€750 to replace the battery since I had to replace the entire keyboard and trackpad to do that.<p>- I found a PC repair shop that said he can do it for a couple hundred €, and it worked fine<p>- 3 months later the laptop shut down unexpectedly. The apple refused to fix it (even paying) because I used a battery not official. The Mac is now a brick<p>So 2.5y of personal use (not professional) cost me €3.5K. More expensive than a cheap car.<p>edit: the battery replacement with all top case cost me ~€750. Confirmed looking back at the emails

I got a pair of Airpod max back from Apple (they&#x27;d evidently replaced them with a refurb pair.) Didn&#x27;t use them for a couple of days till I heard them making a sound. I pulled them out and got a notice on my phone that the AirPod Max I had was associated with an iCloud account. I wasn&#x27;t super stoked about getting a pair of trackable headphones given to me by Apple so I emailed Tim and explained the situation. Got a call back the next day from someone in the Apple exec service team asking for the details, I explained and mentioned I wanted 2 things resolved. Non-refurbished pair of headphones and an understanding if they could have indeed been tracked or not. The next day got an answer back on both of them: no, can&#x27;t have a non-refurbished pair. And, yes, could have been tracked via the find my the headphones were attached to, sorry about that!

It is delightful that OP was able to get Tim’s exec team to fix this for them. Broadly speaking, this indicates that there needs to be a mechanism to bind your IRL identity to your digital identity and your device(s). Instead of showing proof of purchase, you provide a government credential you bound to the account and or the device, and assuming trust in the identity proofing process, you receive access to your device or account because you are known to be who tied the device to your IRL identity.<p>Emailing Tim doesn’t scale.<p>(I have filed comments with the FTC on this account recovery matter regulatory gap; identity is a component of my work in infosec, primarily in financial services)

Every business should be able to service their customers in human-to-human interactions. &quot;We&#x27;re too big to have humans speak to our human customers&quot; is becoming normalised and that&#x27;s a trend we need to reverse. Growing revenue streams without investing in the support those revenue streams need, is a bad business practice.

&gt; When first activating a MacBook, Apple makes it easy to skip setting up FindMy. But given the severe consequences for not doing so, I think either need to revise the setup workflow to make this downside abundantly clear, or revisit their unlock policy altogether.<p>Seems like a reasonable suggestion, hopefully someone at Apple sees it and adds in a warning about the consequences of skipping that step.

Mostly unrelated, but I think activation lock and similar schemes should have an expiry date, like 2-3 years. It will drastically reduce the amount of senseless e-waste that are perfectly working computers someone just didn&#x27;t bother to log out of.

This policy is to prevent people from selling their laptop to someone (who sets up an account with Find My Mac) and then stealing it back and requesting Apple to make it theirs again.

I believe my letter to Tim Cook worked too!<p>MacOS Big Sur broke support for high refresh rate external displays for Intel Macs. It was the DSC feature of HDMI&#x2F;DP protocols, 4 years ago. Everyone that had it working at 4k@144Hz in MacOS Catalina, got only 60Hz in Big Sur and later.<p>Apple Support &#x2F; Engineering department had me to install Catalina, show that 4k@144Hz actually works, got a ton of diagnostic data and came back with &quot;you may downgrade to Catalina as a solution&quot; LOL<p>Wrote to Tim Cook, with case number and, wait for it, MacOS Sonoma had it fixed!

Seems another example of Apple pretending it can&#x27;t (or never would) do something related to stolen equipment – that they <i>can</i> &amp; <i>actually do</i> if you just reach the right person with the right request.<p>My related story of someone likely circumventing my activation lock, using either fake docs or a compromised Apple-authorized agent, a few days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38622248">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38622248</a>

Related:<p><i>Not setting up Find My bricked my MacBook</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37865941">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37865941</a> - Oct 2023 (556 comments)

A simple lesson I feel many including the author are missing after that ordeal. It&#x27;s not your MacBook.

For most people, this is a &quot;You didn&#x27;t know the consequences, so you never did it&quot; kind of situation. I partially blame the process. The OOBE workflow gives you the option to not enable Find my Mac, so some percentage of users refuse. Not all Mac owners are fluent in Apple&#x27;s walled garden.<p>But to counter my last point, owning a mac requires a mild investment in learning, and a lot of buy-in for their ecosystem, including linking and locking it with an online account. Apple Store. Apple Music. Activation Lock &#x2F; iCloud everything. Not all users are fully aware of that though, and OP&#x27;s scenario is one of those journeys.<p>But now that you know, this scenario is analogous to keeping a spare key outside your car. Someone can take it and install a new lock cylinder.<p>If your laptop changes hands and someone wiped it and put an activation lock of their own on it. This is working as intended. There&#x27;s no functional difference between selling it to that person because anyone can wipe a machine and put a new lock on it.<p>The alternative includes setting up an activation lock of your own, or putting MDM on it.<p>This is a feature of Apple&#x27;s walled garden. You either go all-in, or you go against the grain and lose the benefits and get blindsided by an unforeseen experience.<p>Personal thoughts: I manage Macs for a living, but never will buy one of my own. Not just the walled garden complaints above, but a 5 year old Lenovo with similar specs is a better technical investment than a 5 year old Mac. The Mac will be slower with 5 years of OS updates, meanwhile the Lenovo you won&#x27;t really notice a difference. It&#x27;s also less than half the price.

I wonder if Tim could get my stolen Apple ID back? A thief took my phone after watching me enter my passcode, so they were able to change the “trusted phone number” and lock me out. There’s a new feature in iOS 17.3 to prevent this but it wasn’t available at the time.<p>Several calls to Apple Support explaining the situation and offering to provide any form of identification they’d like hasn’t helped; their policy is that the phone number is the key piece to verify your identity, even more so than the email for the Apple ID.<p>I lost a couple hundred in purchased apps, but losing years’ of photos was the worst. I had apparently selected an option to keep the full-res images in iCloud, so my backups only contained thumbnails. Lots of lessons learned, but such a frustrating experience.

<i>My theory is that the shop reset the MacBook and reported it as lost with a new Apple ID in order to extort the person&#x2F;&#x2F;Perhaps the person didn’t want to admit it, but they actually paid money to the shop, who initially gave it back to them “unlocked”. Later the shop could lock it again by reporting it as lost, as a way to ask for more money from the person again.</i><p>Wow...<p>Moral of the story is never take your Apple devices for any kind of internal repair to anyone except Apple authorized shops. There&#x27;s a lot of tiny device shops that do fantastic work with all kinds of phone screens, protectors, fixing broken stuff...but there&#x27;s definitely some unscrupulous ones out there. Really sad that these scammy ones give the tiny hard-working little shops a bad name...:(

I’m entertained that Apple has an informal customer support service built under Tim’s email. He doesn’t actually personally read these does he? I’ve heard of a few other examples where this worked, including for other companies. How does this work internally?

This has happened with various anti-theft systems for a really long time, most of those cases not having a happy ending (some sort of class-action payout of a few pennies at best).<p>I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised that there is no real &#x27;have your cake and eat it too&#x27; version of this where you can make something secure (both integrity and confidentiality) while also not risking losing access or ownership yourself. At least not yet.<p>It has the same issue trying to make a &#x27;regulatory backdoor&#x27; in a crypto system, it just weakens the system and as a result just means such backdoors get abused by everyone making the crypto system worthless.

That such an email led to a positive resolution for him should be a giant red flag to Apple. I doubt this is just a corner case, so it means that Apple&#x27;s systems are badly flawed and need to be corrected.

How many people work in the “office of the ceo” in a company like Apple or Amazon? Does he have like 5 assistants that cover different areas or is this a fully staffed org with 30+ people around the world?

I&#x27;m sure this is true for a lot of companies, many have a support department that takes care of the &quot;difficult cases&quot;. On of the quickest ways to get in touch with them is through sending emails or letters to the CEO. Bonus points if strongly worded, although the people working there will hate you while trying to help you out. They might be better connected and have options to handle things that a normal support person doesn&#x27;t have.<p>Source: I&#x27;m married to someone working in one of those departments.

So what should other people in this position do? Complaining on HN and emailing to Apple CEO isn&#x27;t a working model.<p>What about a lawsuit against Apple?

What is this scenario where someone&#x27;s laptop gets stolen and then somehow returned to them? Is that common? Never heard of that ever. And with all this information about what happened to it <i>while it was stolen</i>. So weird.

I’m sorry, but I honestly feel like this is the OPs fault entirely. It’s clear they had disabled account security on the laptop, in order for the other user who swapped laptops to add their account to that laptop. It’s not even that they didn’t enable “Find My” (which it does during initial setup, all you need to do is add an iCloud account)… he disable the password required setting to open the Mac. (Yes you can disable the requirements for logging in, but it’s definitely not the default setting) If you jump through such hoops in the first place to weaken your computer’s security, your can’t claim it’s not your fault when someone encrypts your computer on you.<p>I buy Mac’s specifically because for me this is a feature. I have backups. And if someone steals my laptop or I lose it, I’d much rather be out the money and the hardware and have it 100% bricked unusable and inaccessible, than have any possibility of my data getting accessed. (Not to mention making it worthless to the average petty thief).<p>Creating a work around, no matter how many N levels of authentication means there’s a hole for social engineering, and I’m definitely not a fan of that.<p>So it’s a trade off. If you don’t care about such level of security, then there are other laptop options, but please don’t ask Apple to start making their security weaker because there are those of us who want it this way.<p>And if you’re traveling with your laptop, put a password on it at least, and better yet encrypt it.

why would anyone in their right mind not set up &quot;find my&quot; ?

Wait so help me understand this - how did the store revoke the existing activation lock?<p>Or did this happen because OP forgot to setup FindMy when they first got the device?

Oh absolutely it was an extortion attempt from the shop. Name and shame if you can.

I’m happy for OP, but this is for the most part working as intended.<p>Ownership is hard to establish in a world where selling 2nd hand and gifting items exists. Last thing you want is to facilitate a boomerang scam or give an abusive partner control over someone’s device.<p>As far as I know Find My is opt-out nowadays and while Apple could see if they could tweak the onboarding language a bit to warn people of potential bad outcomes, you want to keep onboarding clean in general and including all ifs and buts for every feature would make that impossible.<p>I think there’s also something to be said for the lack of curiosity amongst users these days. Apple publishes manuals for all their devices which go into great detail and get updated with every major OS update.<p>Devices also offer up a tour (macOS) and tips (iOS) that go over useful features. And there’s of course the option to look into features yourself.

and this is why devices like this need biometrics not&#x2F;and passwords

A user being denied access to a resource they own is a security issue. It has a name: <i>denial of service (attack)</i>.

The story is 2500+ words in two different articles, to summarize:<p>* The author&#x27;s MacBook was lost&#x2F;stolen<p>* Because the author hadn&#x27;t set up Find My, someone else was able to reset the laptop<p>* When the author recovered the laptop, someone else had set up Find My and reported the laptop lost<p>* Because someone else had set up Find My, the author was unable to reset the laptop<p>* Apple refused to reset the laptop for the author, despite the author having a receipt for the laptop&#x27;s original purchase<p>It&#x27;s interesting to me, because it&#x27;s actually an inversion of the whole &quot;we don&#x27;t own our devices anymore&quot; trope. The author successfully begged Apple to backdoor an otherwise effective security and ownership protection.<p>Apple gave the author the tools to recover their laptop in the event it was lost or stolen, and the author consciously chose not to use those tools. Possession is 9&#x2F;10ths of the law, and if you don&#x27;t have Find My enabled it&#x27;s 10&#x2F;10ths of the law.<p>That means if someone else gains possession of your device, and you chose not to use Find My, there is nothing Apple can or should do to save you. How would they know who the legitimate owner is beyond possession or Find My? People sell used MacBooks all the time.<p>Just because the author was the original purchaser, doesn&#x27;t mean they are the rightful owner. In this case I believe the author probably is the rightful owner, but I would rather Apple not be the judge of that.<p>This is literally <i>only</i> a problem for people too stubborn to set up Find My, who also care deeply about recovering their laptop if it gets lost. Think about how paradoxical that is!

Reminds me of the time my dad bought a TRS-80 and the screw holes were filled with Glyptal to prevent end-user repair or modification. He drilled through the Glyptal, then contacted the literal president of Tandy to complain. Tandy never sealed the screw holes to its computers again (though they did still do the &quot;warranty void if this sticker is broken&quot; trick on some of their equipment). I doubt Apple will fix their practices though. They may be in the right: as soon as that MacBook got stolen it should have been considered compromised and completely forfeit. Cryptographically tying your hardware to your digital identity, as Apple does, provides, among other things, a means to recover your hardware without having to consider it untrustworthy.<p>Hell, Tandy may have been in the right. TRS-80 hardware was bodgy as all get-out and sometimes downright dangerous to open: the cathode on the CRT was dangerously close to the mainboard and likely to fry the computer, if not the user, if the user wasn&#x27;t skilled enough to open the machine very carefully.