If someone technical enough to have a hardware wallet and "smart" enough to have amassed half a million dollars falls for this scam, I think it tells you more about how much (misplaced) trust they put in Apple rather than how careless they were, but that's just my opinion.

I don't think this is a good argument at all. They'd have to be "technical" enough to write down 13 words when instructed, and they'd have to be "smart" enough to happen to be early.

So basically no technical or smarts are needed to get to this situation. If anything this suggests the person is your fairly average "dumb" user.

If I had half a million in bitcoin, I'd divide it up into multiple wallets.

The real issue is Bitcoin here.

Bitcoin makes scamming so much more lucrative . So many pple have been scammed such as fake apps and giveaway scams.

s/Bitcoin/Apple

I'm surprised too... He had his life savings in Bitcoin?

A good friend of mine has ~98% of his savings in BTC since 2015 and know quite a bit of other people with high % of their savings in it. For those that can ignore the short term volatility, who have good incomes as safety nets (say FAANG jobs) to weather any storms, those who don't trust their governments and who are relatively young to recover any large losses, it can be an acceptable tradeoff (needless to say, a very profitable one as well).

You know I used to think exactly like this when I was younger, but nowadays, I realize that putting the burden of understanding technology on the user is very unfair. Just because someone is worth half a million dollars doesn't mean they should automatically know how to identify scam apps...

If you want to play the grown-up card, ok: the grown-up thing to do with half a mil would have it be in the hands of a registered investment advisor at a reputable and insured institution, who is actively growing that money for you using reasonable investment principles based on your investment horizon, goals, and comfort level; and not pissing it away on the latest hype cycle. But that is only because I lived through the silver boom & bust, the mortgage bond scam, the junk bond scam, the S&L scam, the first commercial online investment platforms, the dot com bubble, the second mortgage collapse... and Bitcoin* is more of the same.

* I said "Bitcoin" and not "cryptocurrency" intentionally. Because the jury is still own on the latter, but the former most certainly will not be the CC of the future IMHO due to its massive privacy shortcomings, among other things.

The man's recklessness was caused by a false sense of security created by Apple themselves.