Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/13/see-bold-thieves-snatch-2700.html
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Well I hope they signed up for AppleCare!
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I’m surprised the door greater tried to block them. People have been fired for that.
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The displays weren’t locked down?
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Can’t Apple just brick this stuff from remote?
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If they’re quick about it and the thieves are dumb.
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They can. There are some methods for getting around it from what i recall, i curiously looked into it years ago but i don’t know if that’s any different these days.
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The guy in white who physically obstructs their exit and gets knocked down seemed to be a bystander. The Apple employees seemed to stay out of the way; I assumed they were getting near the door so they could get a better look at the thieves for later identification.
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Interesting how the young girls closest to the entrance huddled for protection instinctively.
Simply amazing that nobody tried to stop the thieves.
Oh, you’re probably right. He’s not wearing the same uniform.
Someone did, but apparently he wasn’t an employee. Generally customer service personnel aren’t supposed to physically intervene unless they’re security. Insurance claim for a few machines is small potatoes. Insurance claim for injured or dead employee is a corporate nightmare.
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Not worth the risk, if i had been in that store i would’ve stayed away too. That’s what insurance is for and Apple aint hurting for money.
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I don’t understand how they got $27k worth of stuff. It looks like they clear one table of 8 laptops and then run. They would all have to be the highest end MacBooks to come near that number and those have to be specced out. They wouldn’t just be on display.
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27k divided by 8 is $3,375 a pop, this to me seems about right, not even near the high end of what Apple has (fully specced their really high end is $6,669)
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When they got home they signed up for iCloud and Apple Music.
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Seems like the Genius Bar needs a Bouncer!
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Oh, you’re right. Bad math.
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If anything it illustrates how overpriced their hardware is
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Don’t forget Apple Care. That’s how they get you.
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They are secured to the table so you can’t just pick them up and walk away with them. If you watch the video, the two thieves at the macbook table on the left can be seen yanking out the security cables before closing the lids and dashing off with their stack of macbooks.
Not sure what method Apple uses to secure their display models, these guys look to be detaching the cables with brute force.
If they’ve got the display models set up properly, yes. But the laptop has to be awake and connected to wifi to get the “wipe yourself now” signal. Closing the lid puts the mac to sleep. If you have the account password, AFAIK, there’s nothing keeping you from waking it up away from wifi, wiping the disk and reinstalling a clean OS with new credentials. If I were one of those thieves, I would have equipped myself with knowledge of the default account credentials used by that store on their display models (judicious shoulder surfing would probably do it).
ETA: OTOH, I am not sure how serial numbers fit into the remote wipe functionality. Once a sucker buys one of these stolen macs and tries to log into icloud, they may be in for a shock if the “find my mac” functionality has a blacklist of stolen serial numbers.
ETA2: having read the article linked to by @Keith_McClary below, I see I am wrong on this. Demo model macs now have a special build of MacOS installed that bricks itself the instant it ceases to be in range of the store’s wifi. So this is a video of a very dumb theft.
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Funny when I priced out a similarly equipped Lenovo for my sons school it was only $150 less than the Mac.
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