From what I’ve read, Apple can and has worked with third parties to unlock MDM-associated and activation locked devices, but only after a certain period of time and reasonable proof of legitimate ownership to try to avoid creating a pipeline to “legitimize” stolen hardware, which doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable. There’s no point in having a locking feature if they’ll roll over and unlock it for just anybody.
"Reasonable proof of legitimate ownership" translates to "record of first-sale purchase directly from Apple" only, from every example I have seen.
They have steadfastly refused to differentiate between the concepts of abandoned/donated devices vs. stolen ones -- very convenient for them, as it drives more sales of new devices and increasingly hamstrings the used market.
> They have steadfastly refused to differentiate between the concepts of abandoned/donated devices vs. stolen ones
This is a valid complaint, but at the same time that differentiation can be messy and difficult to systematize in a way that's not enabling thieves.
Something I've advocated for in the past is a feature in the firmware that allows new owners to request an unlock from the original owner, which could be as simple as an email and/or SMS that the original owner can answer yes/no. This isn't a perfect fix, but it takes Apple out of the loop outside of acting as a relay, and if the original owner in fact abandoned or donated the device in question they'll have no qualms with unlocking it for the new owner.
We've had trouble since they retired of some MDM and Server OS services in recent years. We can only get support for serial numbers we can prove we purchased, and our Apple corporate accounts manager rep says that their corporate purchase history back-end software only goes back 18 months. I'm with 'Wingman4l7' on this being greenwashing nonsense.
