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[caption id="attachment_7801" align="alignnone" width="497"] Artist's sketchy reconstruction of the theft of my friend's iPad at McDonald's.[/caption]

Over the last six years Apple has done a remarkable job of making their iPhones and iPads very desirable items. Recently Apple has actually been adding features to their iOS to make the devices less desirable -- to thieves.

’Tis the season for giving and taking

Friday a friend of mine had her purse and iPad stolen off her table in McDonald's. She'd gotten up to put some little thing in the garbage and someone grabbed her stuff off the table and was out the door and down the street before anyone could react. Unfortunately McDonald's security was no help. As bad luck would have it their cameras were as blind to the theft as the other customers had been.

Having your ID and wallet stolen, not to mention your computer, is a big deal personally, but the police can only afford to view it as petty theft; don't expect them to run to your aid. My friend spoke to them by phone in the back of the McDonald's -- struggling to hear the police officer on the other end of the line over the clatter of food preparation. She did her best to answer a check-list of questions: name, address, what was stolen objects, and what was the value?

Before she did anything else, my friend went home, grabbed her passport so she had some ID, and went and cancelled her credit card. Then she went to her Apple reseller and bought a new iPad.

Thanks to iCloud, the Apple reseller was able to stock my friend's new iPad it with all the configurations and settings from her old iPad. Apple's iCloud is a free data storage and syncing service, which gives users not only 5 GB of online storage, but automatic, daily backups over a Wi-Fi connection of their user data, device settings, and online purchase history for music, movies, TV shows, apps, and books.

Apple thinks of everything, even the thief

As of iOS 6, iCloud has a Lost Mode which can be used to remotely lock a lost or stolen iDevice with a special passcode, and display a message on the lock screen.

To use Lost Mode the user needs to turn on an app called Find My iPhone, or Find my iPad, depending on the device, which is "baked-in" with iOS 7, and perhaps iOS6, but not turned on by default. If the user has set up Find My iPhone/iPad on the device before it was lost or stolen. they can also use their iCloud account to erase it remotely. Apple cautions the erase option isn't available if the device is in Lock Mode, and once it is erased it can't be located remotely.

The most recent iOS7 beefs up the Find My iPhone/iPad app with the Application Lock which means the person who has the iDevice, but not the Apple ID and the account password of the original owner, can only stare at the phone number and read a custom message on the lock screen. My friend's stolen iPad was thus set to lock and display a message that it had been stolen and the thief had two hours to return it, and that the police had been notified.

The iDevice has to be connected to the Internet to receive any of these remote commands via iCloud; so an iPhone on a wireless cellular contract would instantly be locked with the screen message. In the case of an iPad without cellular, the thief would have to get past the basic unlocking password and go on line with the Wi-Fi -- then the iSh*t would conceivably hit the fan.

Everything about the experience with Apple, impressed my friend -- how quickly they got her up and running with a new iPad, almost as if the theft never happened, as well as the steps they put in place to help make the iPad useless to the thief. Apple's obsession with making sure iOS customers have a near-perfect user experience is good business. And making sure thieves don't, wins them points as well.