Comment by vel0city
1 month ago
> It's not at all obvious that this is what happens.
This is what we've empirically seen as Apple went from having devices which could trivially be reflashed and resold without much impediment to now most iPhones being locked and their hardware parts cryptographically tied together.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-lea...
The rates of phone theft have gone radically down since phone makers have made it harder to reflash and part out the parts of the phones.
There is a lot of "how to lie with statistics" going on with correlations like that. To begin with, property crime rates have been declining year over year in general, so "it was lower the year after X" is the expected result whether or not X actually did any good. This is especially true in years -- like the one in question -- that follow an epidemic of thefts, and then subsequent years see large declines as a result of reversion to the mean.
Then clickbait headline authors do their favorite thing and find a table of numbers, sort by size and choose the biggest one. 50% in London! That's probably not an outlier, right? But down to 25% by the time they get to city number 3, and no other cities are listed.
Likewise, when there are a lot of thefts then everyone tries a lot of solutions, and then some subset of them do something (or just reversion to the mean again) and everybody wants to claim it was their thing that solved it.
But if it was their thing, and their thing is still in place, then the theft rate shouldn't be going back up again, right? Yet it is:
https://www.crisis24.com/articles/increasing-rates-of-phone-...
> In London, street thefts saw a 150 percent increase, with 78,000 phones reported stolen between Sept. 2023-2024.