Such as? 
It is at the beginning of the quote at the end of the original post:
In cases when a device is lost or stolen, Schindler says he’s more than happy to hand it off to law enforcement in order to find the owner, but that’s a rare occurrence. And reuniting the owner with their device is an even rarer occurrence. That’s a shame, because the intent of the lock is to protect owners from theft. Refurbishers would be happy to return stolen devices if they had the means to contact the original owner, or verify that it was stolen with the police or a mobile carrier.
It says he’s happy to return it to find the owner.
That suggests that he has a way to know if it’s lost or stolen. I don’t imagine law enforcement calls him to say “Hey, we have a dude who lost his phone, can you check if you have it?”
Later in that paragraph, it says there’s not a means to figure out if it’s lost or stolen. Something doesn’t add up. Maybe he’s saying that few of the devices he receives are returned to their owners.
I will allow that my opinion is likely colored by anecdotal bias, but I know more people who have lost their phones and had them returned than people who have lost their phones and not had them returned.
If I understand it correctly, the refurbished cannot distinguishes it from an user who forgot to remove the default protection, and it is implied that this is intentionally done by apple to get those devices out of circulation.
It seems that they cannot contact the user who has locked the device, or they would be able to return them in the case of stealing or to ask them to unlock the device if they sold it to someone else.
But, I don’t own any apple product, so I may be missing some implementation details.
From the top of my head: Sell them cheaper. Make them repairable, so they last longer. Make the world a fairer place so nobody actually has desire to steal a laptop anymore. Or simply lock them down only AFTER they have been reported as stolen. There’s never just one way to do something, it’s just as long as fucking the environment comes free, businesses reliably chose that option, no need to split the difference.
Is it, though? Or is it just marketed as such?
I’ve never said that.
Edited: Sorry, I think it is a problem with the quote tool, which just eat some parts and does not show that is quote from a quote)
I guess the original idea was to really avoid theft and the obsolescence came as a bonus, since most of the value comes from assuring the buyer that the risk of losing the money invested is lower.
If I’m not mistaken, it also offers some tracking tools to try to recover it, and it probably could be implemented better, but only to achieve marginal improvements.
The obsolescence side comes more from neglect/laziness to implement better tools than to intentionally introducing something evil, and the affected users are a minority.
For example, the idea to reduce the performance of older devices with OS updates is a better example of an action done aiming at reducing the second-hand market.
That is a valid assumption, especially as is in line with Hanlon’s Razor.
Agreed. Also Apple’s fight against the right to repair comes to mind here.
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