Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Home Depot introducing DRM to power tools to prevent theft." video.

@marcusa.rivera6377 If the employees are the thief, a system that can be deactivated/activated by the employees is not going to fix the issue.
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@Cheepchipsable Car stereos are nowadays fully custom units that fit only one selected car model. No car comes with ISO 7736 DIN or Double DIN slots. In addition, even if the thief got unit from identical model to your car, you would still need to reprogram the radio using the ODB-2 port because nowadays everything is connected digitally gateway unit in your car and reprogramming that unit requires special tools preventing normal users from swapping radio of the car they own. Of course, all this makes fixing/replacing your own radio unit in your own car much more expensive, too. And customers accept this because they do not understand this while they make the purchase decision to buy the radio with the car. If they did research before the purchase decision, the might push back. If only 0.01% of the customers mind about things like this, car manufacturers tell you to either accept their style or go away.
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Jimmy S At least higher end VAG cars used to have pretty nice factory radios and up to around 2003 those cars had DIN standard layout, too. The only protection for those radios was the pin code entry. Later models have fully custom layout and frontends not following any standards so there's no sense to steal those.
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I fully agree with your reasoning: this doesn't prevent stealing but it might prevent resale of those stolen items. And that may keep the prices of the items on sale higher. And of course, the most expensive part of most power tools these days is the battery. The rest of the tool is often cheap and the only wear part inside the battery is the cells so if you have a bad battery from existing tool, swapping the cells from a new battery even if the rest of the tool is worthless will still give you a battery worth $50-$100 which can be sold by the thief. And if they put the DRM stuff inside the tool and keep the batteries standard, that will be even easier for the thief.
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Stealing iPhones actually makes sense because that's the only way to get spare parts when Apple prevents getting chips from official sources. And I'm only half joking here.
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