Reeks of them just wanting to make it so you can't easily swap your AT&T service plan to a competitor's phone. Just more of Apple's "what can we do different so as to create even more vendor lock in" ... and they'll get away with it too since they're the all mighty Apple with their cult-like ritualistic indoctrination, effete status symbol image, and "can do no wrong" attitude on the part of the people DUMB ENOUGH to throw money away on their products. No matter how many times they screw over their customers with lies, price gouging, refusal to repair whilst blocking off any attemt at third party repairs. Remember, we're talking about the douchebag company that if you take a battery out of an iPhone or iMac, put it into a box, and try to ship it from overseas to the US? Sicks the same agency on you for "counterfeiting" that is locking up small children in pens like animals. It's bad enough that their parts policy was akin to saying an entire Toyota is counterfeit because you put Eagle GT's on it to replace the crappy yokohama tires, without them now basically saying that if you take the yokohama tires out of a junkyard and put them on a new car, the whole car is counterfeit. ... and then having ICE sieze the whole kit and kaboodle! Seriously, WHAT THE F*** type of mental damage does it take for people to buy Apple products? 40 huffing years of this bullshit.
I used to do board level repairs -- and mods -- myself back in the G3/G4 days. What he puts up is exactly what I was dealing with 20 years ago when I ran an Apple Certified shop --aka we were certified to use their RMA system and not do a damned thing else to the machines. ...and that was BEFORE the current wave of trying to lock people out of machines with the idiocy of non-standard screws and gluing parts in. Even then they neutered PCMCIA slots by omitting two power rails and called it "AirPort" so only their wireless cards worked (though a handful of Buffalo chipset cards did work proving it was in fact PCMCIA), swapped master and slave on optical drives so slim form-factor aftermarket drives couldn't be used in the iBooks (without shorting two pins together). They used flat-cables that were a fraction thinner than the design called for in displays resulting in the "striping" problem. They sold 18 bit displays with internal dithering on the controller claiming they were 24 bit. They underclocked 600mhz G3's in the toilet seats all the way down to 233mhz so they could wrap them in insulating foam instead of putting a heat sink on them and avoid putting those dreadful fans in the machine. There's a reason I've said for 30 years Apple don't know the difference between cooling and the power plug on the back of the machine. They wouldn't know proper cooling if it stripped naked, painted itself Noctua tan, and hopped up on a table to sing "Oh look at what a big cooling fan I am". A problem dating all the way back to the Apple II, hence why the #1 aftermarket part for their very first true commercial machine was a sidecar containing one giant fan forcing air into the machine through the vents on the side! The history of Apple is a history of lies. They cozied up to education so they could rewrite computer history and their place in it. They have spent their entire existence overcharging, under-delivering, and preying upon the ignorance of the consumer. NOTHING they do today is ANY different than the sleazy, two-faced, underhanded dirtbag scam-artist bullshit that has been the company's business model since day ONE. If ANY other company in ANY other industry ran that way, their entire management staff both present and past would be locked up. But no, it's the all-mighty Apple that can do no wrong. Jobbo the clown had more in common with Manson and Jones than he did any proper businessman... and the ONLY reason anyone seems to be DUMB ENOUGH to throw money away on crApple products is a mix of ignorance, social status, and cult-like appeal. Basically, Apple peddles tainted flavor-aid. So them embracing a technology that gives 100% remote control over what devices are authorized to use a phone plan? BUSINESS AS USUAL. Just another way for them to leverage vendor lock-in.