No surprises here. Just like the lockdown on iPhone screen and part replacements, Macbooks suffer from the same Apple’s anti-repair and anti-consumer bullshit. Battery glued, ssd soldered in and can’t even swap parts with other official parts. 6000$ laptop and you don’t even own it.
What does that even mean?
Anti-theft, which is a dual-edged sword.
Activation lock prevents the device from functioning without the consent of the owner, but if the owner is locked out of their iCloud account, the device is a brick.
Serializing components has the side effect of preventing activation locked devices from being harvested for parts. Unfortunately, this also means that perfectly working parts cannot be used to repair other iPhones.
It’s very hard to walk that fine line between anti-theft and repair. The way Apple is doing it definitely seems to be with an anti-third-party-repair goal, though.
I personally think activation lock is fine, but serializing components is not.
Maybe they have stock in an ewaste disposal company. Apple creates a lot of that, now that they’re unrepairable and un-resale-able.
It means they were dropped on their head as a child.