Bypassing a Theft Threat Model

Thieves cut through the wall of a coffee shop to get to an Apple store, bypassing the alarms in the process.

I wrote about this kind of thing in 2000, in Secrets and Lies (page 318):

My favorite example is a band of California art thieves that would break into people’s houses by cutting a hole in their walls with a chainsaw. The attacker completely bypassed the threat model of the defender. The countermeasures that the homeowner put in place were door and window alarms; they didn’t make a difference to this attack.

The article says they took half a million dollars worth of iPhones. I don’t understand iPhone device security, but don’t they have a system of denying stolen phones access to the network?…