When I sent my Apple laptop in for a battery replacement, their suggestion was to backup and wipe the drive.

Which is also quite absurd considering how much hassle it is to restore your backup once it's shipped back. (sure it's still much better than giving repair shop access to your hd).

Yeah, honestly, I'm not sure why one couldn't run an external technician boot image, do minor checking for on-board drive health in an unused area, and never touch the customer data. Though sometimes I understand that the entire main board gets swapped. That would shorten the repair timeline, and the malfunctioning board can be assessed and repaired or disposed of on some other timeline.

Yes, but "hassle" and "security" are synonymous a lot of the time. even if their policy was that they didn't use the boot drive, I'd rather wipe it. No reason to give someone your data, your employers' data, etc.

And as someone who has recently had a MacBook Pro repaired, they swapped virtually everything. Keyboard, Mboard, Touch Bar, etc. the only original thing now is the screen. I would have had to restore from backup anyway. As a plus, my SSD is now brand new so any wear on it after 2.9 years of service is gone :)

You can only wipe the drive if the computer will boot, not something a lot of devices that need repair are happy to do.

Honestly, I've not had this particular issue in about 10 years, but you're right. If it is dead enough it won't boot, then I guess wiping it would be tough. For me, the combo of Target disk mode, recovery partition, or external boot drive have always gotten the job done. But yeah, if the logic board is really dead and not just "failing" then I might be tempted to use a drill.

yea. I can understand them suggesting backup your hd before shipping it to repair, because shit happens and they could need to swap your hd. but also suggesting customer to wipe it means even when shit doesn't happen customer still need to deal with the hassle of restore the hd once repair is done.

Yeah but you get emojis where the function keys normally are on lesser laptops.

It's trivial to restore from a Time Machine backup (it wouldn't be much use if it wasn't).

Time Capsule was discontinued in 2018. I am not sure I want to trust Qnap or Synology on my TimeCapsule backup for Security Reason. I dont have another Mac to do Backup. And dont want anything to do with iCloud or iCloud backup / restore is very slow even with 1Gbps Internet connection.

How is a customer suppose to backup and wipe their devices?

Just plug a USB/Thunderbolt drive in. The first thing macOS does is ask you if you want to use it for backups.

Those top at 2.8GB/s these days, so about 6 theoretical minutes for 1TB drive. In reality it's probably more of a half hour?

Have you tried recently? Phone icloud backups are even worse.

>Have you tried recently?

Yes, it was fine. If you are in a hurry you can even boot from a Time Machine backup.

> this should be the standard

> Apple customers would have a hard time

I took it to be implicit to the wish that hard drives be owner-serviceable.

I imagine that taking out the HDD would've been beyond most Apple customers even when the storage was removable and the computer was held together with (somewhat) standard screws.

It doesn't feel like that long ago (granted, it was the best part of twenty years...) that my Mac laptop had a lever underneath which popped the HDD clean out. That was a lovely design.

Apple has been making their devices much harder to open as time has passed. My 2011 MacBook didn't have any kind of a lever mechanism but after taking out about ten Philips 00 screws, the lid lifts clean open.

And now my 2019 work MacBook requires taking out non-standard pentalobe screws, then using a suction cup to pry the lid open slightly in order to cram a wedge tool in-between to pop it open and then you need to slide it out in order to actually get it out.

I'm an Apple customer and I'm happy with my pre-2013 era Macbook Pros with 2x2TB SSDs and 16 GB RAM, which is more than the basic configuration of modern offerings. Unfortunately, the last OS they can run is Mojave so I'll have no choice but to upgrade to M2 when M3 comes out.

It really makes me sad Apple gave up this environment-friendly policy and started to aggressively glue everything preventing upgrades.

> and started to aggressively glue everything preventing upgrades.

The best way to prevent such practices is not to buy their products.