Posted by validatori 1/25/2026
This is ultimately about making the device resistant to downgrade attacks. This is what discourages thieves from stealing your phone.
Not just "there should be some phone brands that cater to me", but "all phone brands, including the most mainstream, should cater to me, because everyone on earth cares more about 'owning their hardware' than evil maid attack prevention, Cellebrite government surveillance, theft deterrence, accessing their family photos if they forget their password, revocable code-signing with malware checks so they don't get RATs spying on their webcam, etc, and if they don't care about 'owning their hardware' more than that, they are wrong".
It is objectively extremist and fanatical.
As time goes on, the options available for those that require such sovereignty seem to be thinning to such an extent that [at least absent significant disposable wealth] the remaining options will appear to necessitate adopting lifestyle changes comparable to high-cost religious practices and social withdrawal, and likely without the legal protections afforded those protected classes. Given the "big tech's" general hostility to user agency and contempt for values that don't consent to being subservient to its influence peddling, intense emotional reaction to loss of already diminished traditional allies seem like something that would reasonably viewed compassionately, rather than with hostility.
None of the situations you mentioned are realistic or even worth thinking about for the vast majority of the population. They're just an excuse to put even more control into the manufacturer's hands.
I don't care if they can downgrade the device, just that I boot into a secure verified environment, and my data is protected.
I also think thieves will just grab your phone regardless, they can still sell the phone for parts, or just sell it anyway as a scam etc.
There's over a 10x difference in fence price between a locked and unlocked phone. That's a significant incentive/deterrent.
It has some increasing timer for auth, and if you try and factory reset it - it destroys all the data?
As I said its less important that the thief can boot a new os, the security of my data is more important. How is that compromised?
It feels like a thief is just going to opportunistically grab a phone from you rather than analyse what device it is.
Using eFuses is a popular way of implementing downgrade prevention, but also for permanently disabling debug flags/interfaces in production hardware.
Some vendors (AMD) also use eFuses to permanently bond a CPU to a specific motherboard (think EPYC chips for certain enterprise vendors).
At the moment they're 'older' and would class as a rollback, which this fuse prevents.
https://service.oneplus.com/us/search/search-detail?id=op588
They make it clear that this feature is unsupported and it's possible to mess things up. The reason why it's an ideal and not an expectation is that flashing alternate operating systems is done at one's own risk and is unsupported. They have already told the users that they bear no responsibility for what may go wrong if they flash the wrong thing on that device. Flashing incompatible operating systems to the device requires people to be careful and proper care to ensure compatibility before going through with flashing was not done.
But to answer your question: we know iPhones have a foolproof kill switch, it's a feature. Just mark your device as lost in Find My and it'll be locked until someone can provide your login details. Assuming it requires logging in to your Apple account (which it does, AFAIK; I don't think logging in to a local account is enough), this is the same as a remote kill switch; Apple could simply make a device enter this locked-down state and then tweak their server systems to deny logins.
Realize that many of these manufacturers sell their hardware in and employ companies in highly policed societies. Just the fact that they are allowed to continue to operate implies that they are playing ball and may well have to perform a couple of favors. And that's assuming they are fully aware of what they are shipping, which may not be always the case.
I don't think it is a bad model at all to consider any cell phone to be compromised in multiple ways even though you don't have hard proof.
Millions of fully working apple devices are destroyed because of that even - Apple won't unlock them even with proof of ownership.
Pre-prod (etc.) devices will also have different fuses burnt.