All things considered, this dude dodged a bullet. I don't know if he was acting under the advice of counsel, but he came out relatively unscathed. This time.
This might be a shot across the bow designed to frighten those without the deep pockets of Apple. Just a reminder that The Man still has teeth when it comes to the 99%.
"We can seize all this money and put you in jail, or you can decide to talk to use without a lawyer and we'll let it all stay."
Coercing rights away is never a good situation to allow. Not that he was wrong in accepting it, but that the police were wrong in being able to offer the option.
I guess in truth it might be "do your backups actually work", but if that's false then you're already in trouble.
I can afford another machine right now, but will that put a monetary strain on other areas of my life that are important to me?
I can afford another machine, and I have backups, but the restoration of the backups is painful enough that I would prefer to avoid it.
I would prefer this episode be over with as quickly as possible as I'm not guilty, so should I comply to speed this process along? (note that I think this isn't necessarily guaranteed to be a good strategy).
Depending on what the police believe about the situation may greatly affect what is the path of least resistance and problems, but you unfortunately have very little insight into exactly what that is. In some cases, talking to and cooperating with the police is the easiest way to extricate yourself from the situation, and in other cases it's the easiest way that they can twist the situation to implicate you in some way. The safest way is to always have a lawyer present and never voluntarily give up information, but not everyone is in a situation that makes the safest choice easy to take.