If your entire startup is dependent on one single Macbook there is something severely wrong with your business model and I hope your customers and/or investors are aware of this risk before giving you any money.

Obviously depending on a laptop for runtime code would be bad, but plenty of early stage startups depend heavily on a small number of machines for customer support and continued development.

Probably a bigger issue isn’t that they’re a single laptop failure away from collapse, the bigger problem is that replacing a laptop right now would be unusually difficult.

In the world of git and cheaply available easy to use backup software, there is zero excuse to not have backups of everything to load on another machine. Even if you want to avoid the cloud and keep it local, a 128gb USB3 drive is under $50.

“A small number of machines” is not what we are talking about. We’re talking about one single consumer-grade laptop that would collapse the entire business forever.

Giving the benefit of the doubt; it’s entirely possible they have that setup, with the tacit assumption that if their machine died they could buy another same day.

Now, you really can’t buy another laptop same day.

Yeah. I gave my MBP (late 2016 “Esc”) to the Apple Store in London for repairs on 12 February. They decided to replace it (yay) and the replacement is scheduled to reach me the week after next. That’s about 10 weeks without my main machine, thanks to SARS-CoV-2. Really drives home the need for a contingency plan.

Might not be a bad idea to buy another laptop (cheap) and just boot it up once a month to make sure you can use it, and if your system dies, then just pull that one out and use it while Apple RMAs your primary. If the cheap laptop doesn't have enough power, just connect to an Amazon Workspace or something and use that until your normal laptop can work again.

I think the critical need is access to the data on the dead Mac. After all, the owner of the dead Mac is still able to post to HN.

Better get cracking on some disaster recovery planning then!

Consider a plan B, like, run Linux on off-the-shelf hardware.

The OS and hardware type are not relevant. Increasing redundancy is what is needed.

Which is exactly why I'd go for the free, fast, user and developer friendly option ;-)