The legitimate owner possesses the device, but it just doesn't work anymore. That's pretty much textbook definition of "broken", and considering it is happening solely because of misbehavior of Apple's software it should be covered under warranty. If you try to report it as "theft" to the police or your insurance, they are rightfully going to laugh at you.
Compare it to a friend borrowing your car. Turns out there is a bug where if you change radio stations 30 times before turning on the ignition, the car permanently destroys its ability to turn on. Your friend accidentally triggers this. Would you consider that "theft" too, or should the manufacturer fix it under warranty?
> Compare it to a friend borrowing your car. Turns out there is a bug where if you change radio stations 30 times before turning on the ignition, the car permanently destroys its ability to turn on.
This explicitly exists in most PCs to protect the Secure Enclave.
If you push the wrong sequence of buttons in the bios or cause too many failures, you can definitely wipe secure boot, which is on by default now, and in a default windows install (with bitlocker) this will result in total data loss, by design, for exactly the same goals and reasons as when apple does it.
Sony’s android phones will even do this to destroy the camera firmware if you unlock the boot loader. Can’t have some competitor get a look at your super secret debayering algorithm!
