Apple picking has become so much lucrative in New York. But consumers aren't happy, so are police authorities. Apple picking in New York meant smartphone theft, and no, preferential treatment is not only exclusive to Apple's iPhones.

The trend has become so bothersome that Eric Schneiderman, New York's attorney general, sent letters to the CEOs of Apple, its closest rival Samsung, as well as to Google/Motorola and Microsoft to help law enforcement authorities combat the "growing public safety problem."

In the first nine months of 2012 alone, based on NYPD records, 11,447 iOS devices were stolen in the Big Apple, up by 40 per cent over the same period in 2011. Smartphone thefts, meantime in San Francisco, at present account for nearly half of all robberies.

It's a scenario also seen in other parts of the world. In London, between April and September of 2012, 56,680 handsets were snatched, half were iPhones.

The term 'Apple Picking' was coined to represent the growing violent street crimes involving smartphone theft. The thieves, after stealing the phones, wipe the devices' memories clean and then resell them on the secondary market for hundreds of dollars.

In sending out the letters, Mr Schneiderman specifically said he wanted to know how the smartphone manufacturers intend to eliminate the growing social menace.

"In particular, I seek to understand why companies that can develop sophisticated handheld electronics, such as the products manufactured by Apple, cannot also create technology to render stolen devices inoperable and thereby eliminate the expanding black market on which they are sold," he wrote in his letter.

In his letter, Mr Schneiderman cited a number of examples where device theft turned violent, including:

  • On April 19, 2012, a 26-year-old chef at the Museum of Modern Art on his way home to the Bronx was killed for his iPhone.
  • On April 2012, 20-year-old Alex Herald was stabbed during an iPhone theft.
  • In September 2012, in three separate incidents, women were violently attacked for Apple and Samsung devices.
  • In February 2013, three people were stabbed on a subway platform in Queens in a fight over an iPhone.
  • Earlier this month, a woman was mugged at gunpoint in Crown Heights for her Android device.

"Foreign trafficking of stolen devices has proliferated, and an abundance of domestic black market resellers, including right here in New York, means as a practical matter that phones do not, contrary to your website's assertion, become unusable," Mr Schneiderman wrote.

Although a number of antitheft technologies are already built into many smartphones, such as Apple's iCloud-based 'Find My iPhone' service, experts observed these are still not enough to deter thieves.