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.