A few years back I bought a MBP online with the pickup option. I picked it up, declined their assistance setting it up and went about my day.
I get home later that day, start to set it up and it’s locked to employees of a bank in Canada. Live support is no help so I take it back, only to find out the serial number did not match that on the box. They had their security guard quietly come stand near me until they figured out what they wanted to do.
The sales guy told me since they can’t prove I stole it they were giving me a different one. I think they knew it was previously returned and realized they got scammed by someone else the first time around.
This time I made sure I could login before I left.
Within the return window the new 16” came out at the same price so I took it in and swapped it for the 16”. They just took it, handed me the new laptop, transferred Apple Care and sent me on my way. It made sense as they didn’t bother to verify the box/device serial number with me. They took my word and processed everything in a matter of minutes.
That corporate lock thing is called DEP, device enrollment program. It used to be easy to bypass (just don't connect to internet during setup) but then it would bug you constantly once you did. On T2/M1/M2 macs it's no longer bypassable similar to the apple account lock anti theft feature (which is a different thing)
Apple can remove it of course. It was probably a laptop stolen from the bank or their suppliers, then returned to Apple to whitewash it.
I'm not surprised this happens. What I am surprised about is that Apple apparently sells a returned item to another customer as new. Pretty sure that's not their policy and in most cases illegal. Perhaps they checked the seals (for activating DEP you don't need to open the box at all!) but still this shouldn't happen.
Normally these items go through a cleaning and reimaging process and then end up on the refurb store at a reduced price.
Did they not scan both??? Many big box retail stores have to scan both the box and the barcode of the item through it (i.e. a Playstation) before the transaction can be completed. Yikes.
I bought one from them about 3 months ago and it was excellent.
I couldn’t get a local dealership to give me the sticker price of a car on their website without showing up in person. I expected all the extra fees they throw in to be hidden but all they would post was MSRP and to call for the price. I call and they pretend to not know the car I am talking about and need to go there to see the specific car. This was multiple dealers.
Carvana though showed me the price, shipping if any, taxes, tag, title before I even tried to buy it.
I've been in a hand full of k-12 schools where there are no stall doors. You can walk in the bathroom and make eye contact with someone who has their pants around their ankles.
FL Rep Randy Fine filed a report with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that the sheriff was going to plant CSAM on his computer and arrest him for it.
Ha! I worked at a place where every Monday I had to count the number of commits each team member made and put them on a weekly report.
Once the company got bought, my new boss in charge of all developers across all divisions asked me to not mention that again so he doesn't have to do that. Once I moved on, it sounds like ParentCo took a more active role in the development and hopefully they stopped that.
Yeah that was a shitty approach. Stuck at same sort of place. I did an order of magnitude more commits than my peers last year. I had to explain that it's because commits are cheap which makes experiments and rollbacks easy, not that I'm code jesus or something.
I used that for some mortgage documents (pre-closing) that they could email me, but needed a 'wet' signature. I happened to be out of town so accessing a printer and scanner wasn't easy.
I used Preview for the longest time before they questioned 1 of the documents.
