No, it actually does set the zero point.

As the user and owner of the product, I should be the sole decider about my own security posture, not some company who doesn’t know my use case or needs.

It’s crazy how we’ve managed to normalize the manufacturer making these kinds of blanket decisions on our behalf.

With that being said, I don’t think Apple see this specific part as a security critical component, because the calibration is not cryptographic and just sets some end point data. Apple are usually pretty good about using cryptography where they see real security boundaries.

Hell: what you really should do is swap my entire laptop with a fake one that merely shows me my login screen (which you can trivially clone off of mine as it happily shows it to you when you open it ;P) and asks for my password, at which point you use a cellular modem to ship it back to you. That would be infinitely easier to pull off and is effectively game over for me because, when the laptop unlocks and I don't have any of my data (bonus points if I am left staring at a gif of Nedry laughing, though if you showed an Apple logo of death you'd buy yourself multiple days of me assuming it simply broke), it will be too late: you'll have my password and can unlock my laptop legitimately.

> There are good security reasons for a lot of what Apple does.

So, no: these are clearly just excuses, sometimes used to ply users externally (such as yourself) and sometimes used to ply their own engineers internally (such as wherever you heard this), but these mitigations are simply so ridiculously besides the point of what they are supposedly actually securing that you simply can't take them seriously if you put more than a few minutes of thought into how they work... either the people peddling them are incompetent or malicious, and, even if you choose to believe the former over the latter, it doesn't make the shitty end result for the owner feel any better.

“Sure, you can borrow my laptop. It’s fine. Take it home. I promise not to spy on you while the lid is closed. I promise not to record aaaaaany audio or anything! And I definitely won’t hear any conversation that contains information that I’ll use to stalk you later!”

There are a million ways that some nefarious person could spy on another, but at least this isn’t one of them.

And I am a very suspicious person, thanks to some eye opening experiences that I’ve had. When someone says that they want to do something that not a lot of people want to do, I immediately wonder how they will use that against myself or someone else. Because that has happened multiple times to me.

I also hate that I am suspicious of people who want to at least have the opportunity to fully own their devices; something that is perfectly reasonable to want, but I am. What would that additional ability do for them? What will they be capable of doing that they can’t do now? How and when will they use it to get what they want out of someone? Or out of me?

If you don’t think like this, I really envy you. For the longest time, every teacher, every supervisor, every commander, every non-familial authority figure I had until I was probably 35, used and manipulated me for the purpose of advancing themselves. Every single one. The ones in the military didn’t even attempt to hide it.

I’m so scarred because of people convincing me to help them screw me over that I no longer trust anyone who is concerned about things like laptop lid angle sensors. Because who are you trying to screw over and why does that angle sensor stand in your way?

The Federal government is forensically collecting phones during routine border crossings to see if you reposted Fat JD Vance memes. That’s publicly disclosed and well know.

I have no trouble believing that potential enemies of the state like the governor of California and his cabinet are bugged. If I were a person like that, I’d try to take supply chain countermeasures.

Within mainland China, Apple was facing fraud of having their devices purchased, stripped for genuine parts, and then rebuilt with knockoffs and sold as new to unsuspecting victims within China or returned. This whole thing that we hate in the west was in response to that fraud.

I don't like it at all, but it's not all Apple being assholes.

Does it though? Are there statistics that clearly show devices aren't being stolen anymore because they cannot monetize them anymore?

The way I see it the only thing this does is make you feel better the thief cannot monetize it, or use it, but it does nothing to prevent the theft which is really a moot point in the grand scheme of things. We end up paying in this way, of not having the freedom to easily and cheaply replace parts, while being comforted that even though they still are getting stolen from us, whoever steals them cannot use/monetize them. Which is quite primitive in a sense, and I do not think it's worth it. But that's just me.

Apple could easily have a dialogue that pops up saying:

"The XYZ sensor in this device is still registered to a device attached to robert8 @icloud.com. Please log into that account now to authorize the component swap".

Whilst the swap isn't authorised, firmware would power the system off after 10 mins, making any stolen laptop parts useless.

Thieves once broke into my car. They stole everything, but then have thrown away things they don't need: which was everything except iPad Pro M1. They have even thrown away an e-ink device which was as expensive.

Many signs suggest that the thieves were in an organized group regularly operating in the area, and I'm certain they knew what they were doing.

My iPad has never appeared online after the theft according to my iCloud.

This was in 2024.

I'm confident this iPad didn't just become a paperweight for the organized group of thieves. But it would become a paperweight for me if, say, the infrared camera went off due to a water damage and I wasn't willing to pay Apple a hefty price for the motherboard replacement.

https://www.economist.com/interactive/britain/2025/08/17/the...

> More recently London has become known as the “phone-snatching capital of Europe”. If the victims manage to track their devices, the goods are most likely to turn up in China.

> Globalisation created the supply chain that allows each iPhone—assembled from nearly 3,000 components—to reach the hands of a consumer. The same forces inverted see that phone yanked out of it, re-exported and broken apart again.

What, you mean in case the parts of two machines accidentally fall out and fall back in to the other machine on the production line or during shipping?

Of course it's to prevent unauthorised repairs. There's no feasible way for the parts to be physically swapped other than someone intentionally doing a repair.

It doesn't even seem like a very good form of QA, since someone without repair experience can always try to take something apart and put it back together. Whether the serials match has little to do with whether the machine is currently assembled correctly.

If things go particularly well you get to launch the feature on multiple hardware revisions at once because the first deployment of the component worked great, which is a neat trick.

not only for mac users.

Plenty of users put stickers on their cameras. One simple user trick would break your whole workflow.

Is 802.11 signal strength consistent/detailed enough that it could be used as another kind of input, as someone cradles the laptop in different ways?

No, it's a different method.

From the description, I would've thought it meant 76 degrees from the user's PoV, i.e. slightly closed so the user would feel compelled to open it more / tilt it into their view (with their hand). The pictures show ~70 degrees from the back of the devices though, so IDK what they mean about the hand moving the screen. There's no need for interacting then, since the display can be seen from afar.

("It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.")

I personally am surprised they don't put an accelerometer in both halves of the laptop and use math to calculate the angle based on gravity.