Over the years, we’ve seen how to get manufacturing data for an Apple product from its serial number, but that’s going to end. MacRumors was able to access an internal communication from Apple in which he announces to his staff a change of these serial numbers to be completely random.
Something similar was announced for iPhones over a year ago, but a series of delays and the pandemic have caused the change not to apply so far. And it goes from iPhones to Macs, with 8 to 14 character strings in no apparent order. The first random numbers would contain 10 characters.
Fight against counterfeiting and fraudulent sale of parts
The main objective of this modification of the random codes is to hide the information: until now it was possible to extract the date and place of manufacture. For the end user, it is a simple curiosity, but for Apple it is an advantage since in this way counterfeiting of parts is stopped with fake serial numbers. With a random number, only Apple will be able to find the basic data of a product.
The arrival of these serial numbers is scheduled for “early 2021”, which means that we should see them soon. Who knows, maybe in what’s featured on March 23 (if anything is featured) they appear. All products currently sold will continue to use traditional serial numbers.
