Actually it does. Once reported to the feds, the proper course of action is to wash your hands of it unless approached for further information from the feds. Doesn't matter who owns the original device. Any other course of action is suspect and in fact illegal by just about any reasonable metric.

I have done quite a bit of data recovery on computers in my time... and do you know how I verify a recovery? I select a handful of known or innocuous files on the drive for viewing. For example; do you realize how many known images and text files there are in the average operating system installation? Just viewing one of these KNOWN files and verifying that they match with what you're expecting to find is good enough usually to imply the data has been recovered correctly. This works in 99% of cases because most people store data on the same drive as their operating system.

So what about non-OS drives? Well, that's a bit more sticky but I would usually select innocuous files of a known type. Usually text files. Never images. And understand also that email is usually stored in a database managed by an application, so reading the email usually requires opening said application first. This is ALSO something I would never do. Hell, I would normally never even be booted into the operating system of a system I was recovering but would be doing the recovery using a different machine or operating environment altogether.

Is there a chance I could discover illegal material? Sure, but it's really unlikely at that point and my first AND ONLY step would be to then provide the computer and contract to law enforcement and then I would just never think about it again. I wouldn't wait a month or two and then call Rudy Giuliani, or anyone else for that matter. Doesn't matter whose laptop it was, I would report it and wash my hands of the entire thing and move on.

I think you dropped a "Known right-wing media mouthpiece, Steve Bannon claimed..." at the start of that sentence.

If by "one of the leading" you mean "4th, with a market share less than half of the number 3 slot" then sure. Oh, worth noting that they're also seeing a decline in market share between 2016 and 2019. [Reference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_computer_vendors)

Apple is a lot of smoke and mirrors along with a dash of planned obsolescence. I'm thrilled your 5 year old Mac is working great... so's my 10 year old Alienware laptop. And it runs the latest version of Windows 10 really well for its age while you can no longer run Big Sur on a Macbook Pro older than 7 years old for no discernible TECHNICAL reason other than Apple doesn't want to deal with people with old hardware. Heck, man... I just retired a 13 year old server from my home lab that was happily running an up-to-date build of Ubuntu because I got something more power efficient to do the same job. There are plenty of older computers out there but they won't be running a current version of Mac OS despite the obvious security implications of not running an up-to-date operating system.

As an ex Mac user, I will say that I personally believe that the Macbook line are terribly engineered laptops with a lot of glaring problems that really drove me away from the brand. People think they're well-engineered because they look nice, kind of like Tesla cars (with a lot of overlap in fanbase by the way).

I will say though that I can probably help with your docking station problem; since Macbooks have had USB-C for a while now you can pretty much go out and buy any number of USB-C docks that'll work with a Mac just fine. I have a Dell WD-19 on my desk because I have a Latitude 7400 2-in-1 attached to it (my work laptop). However, I've connected my brother-in-law's Macbook Pro to it and it recognized everything and just worked. Recognized the NIC, the display interfaces and the USB slots with no issues.

It helps if you think of Apple as a fashion company rather than a computer company. They produce goods that look nicer than cheaper alternatives but are functionally identical or worse. I find if I look in the Mac price range of laptops from other manufacturers I can get a hell of a lot of well-engineered laptop for that money (hence the 7400 2-in-1... and by the way Dell is a big proponent of Right to Repair which Apple is trying to kill)

Phones are a bit more tricky because of the iOS lockin; your apps won't work on an alternative device but if you're willing to either re-buy or find alternatives for your iOS apps then you can get great phones in the same price range. Personally I've been a Google Pixel user for years and have been super happy. My last iPhone was a 4S but I was so glad after I "ripped off the band-aid" and just switched to either different apps or re-bought the ones I really wanted. Keep an eye on Apple; I guarantee the next couple of years they're going to leverage the App Store on Mac to ensure you have a similar lockin to MacOS. They want to keep you in their walled garden. The current denizens don't even seem to realize the wall is getting taller.

Oh I read the context quite well thank you. ZFS isn't for backups but provides many tools that can make backups easier, more reliable and scalable. Perhaps the question wasn't worded quite so well, but I also did not see where you offered a viable alternative solution, or indeed any reason that a ZFS solution would not be appropriate.

Those statistics can be taken a number of different ways.

Bear in mind the average Apple fan is unlikely to have signed up for Rescuecom's call center services, preferring instead to use Apple support or the "Genius" bar. In terms of their placement and their most direct competitors the numbers in that survey don't surprise me all that much. A more relevant breakdown would be up against premium laptop lines from the manufacturers listed. Remember, Dell and HP in particular produce a lot of cheap and utterly crap laptops that are nowhere close in terms of price to Apple's product... a fairer comparison would be against Dell's XPS line specifically and HP's Envy or Spectre lines of laptops. This isn't even taking into account the even higher-end business-grade laptops from both of these manufacturers that I predict would soundly thrash Apple's Macbook Pro's for engineering, build and reliability.

I do find it surprising where Samsung falls in that list but I will freely admit I have no experience with Samsung laptops. Microsoft actually doesn't surprise me because they produce only a very small line of laptops that are firmly targeted at the business and wealthy prosumer... so more akin to Dell's or HP's business-grade laptops rather than their consumer-grade ones.

I, too like to live dangerously.

Did you come from the past?

ZFS has been Linux native for years, and nowadays even the FreeBSD ZFS is a port of OpenZFS and not its own thing. You might've been correct had you stated that ZFS only works on Oracle Linux, because technically the "original" ZFS is the one that Oracle owns and develops as a closed-source solution. OpenZFS was forked from ZFS years ago when Oracle closed it... but you specifically called out FreeBSD which as I mentioned now runs OpenZFS.

Also, Linux roots on ZFS have been a thing in testing for years as well. Granted it's only recently that it's been elevated to a "first class citizen" of being installable with a GUI, but it's been possible from a command-line installation for quite a while.

And RSYNC isn't a reliable backup. What about filesystem metadata that might be important? Where's the scrub to ensure the data you're backing up isn't corrupted?

And to your other point; most consumer-grade NAS's are running ARM SoC's, but the majority of them are also running Linux or FreeBSD at their core. Their arrays are usually either MD arrays in Linux or FreeBSD in either. Recovering data from a Synology Diskstation for example is a simple matter of connecting the disks to a Linux box and using mdadm to reassemble the array.

Fully proprietary NAS's are either the domain of the enterprise-grade NAS's (EMC, NetApp and the like) or at this point so old that nobody should be using them for anything beyond a paperweight... we're talking probably SCSI or IDE drives and fully custom silicon here.

Who says ZFS is a backup? Can you cite these sources, because most of the knowledgeable people (including myself) who run ZFS treat it as a RAID, not a backup. And a RAID that happens to have some very handy and useful features like snapshots, a simple integrated and open command line and so on. The only place I consider ZFS as a backup is on my backup array... the one my primary replicates to every four hours (though could easily be every 15 minutes if I chose that... or heck I could script it for rolling backups if I really wanted to get fancy). And that's just my "first tier" backup.

Every default installation of ZFS I've done in the last couple of years has had auto-snapshotting and auto-scrubbing as a cron job. How often you run the scrub is entirely up to you and you can control the snapshots easily with filesystem settings.

Completely true... but how do you know what file is corrupted and when it got corrupted? That's the challenge of course... and bear in mind depending on your backup cycles you may not actually have a good copy of the file in your backups. Nice thing about ZFS is the auto-scrub will identify the corrupted file at a minimum and allow me to revert to a previous snapshot of that particular file easily. I scrub monthly, so if a corrupted file is found it'll be no more than a month old since the scrub walks the entire pool (so verified monthly). Since I keep up to yearly snapshots on my array I can go back up to a year in just snapshots and simply copy the file over the corrupted one without having to resort to my onsite or offsite backups.

ZFS does have the capability to also fix a corrupted file, but its use cases and caveats are beyond the scope of my post. Even at its simplest, ZFS can at least identify a corrupted file even on a single disk array due to checksums.

Some form of RAID along with snapshots can as well. A backup should be your recovery point in worst case scenarios.

Don't disagree, but this is why you create your own cloud. With blackjack and hookers...

Or failing that, create your own cloud using perfectly simple solutions. Heck, a NAS at a friend's house can be a cloud if you set it up correctly. Or pay for rack space in a datacenter and roll your own solution. A cloud is still just someone else's server :)

Just wanted to note that I totally agree with you, but would probably flip your analogy. Without a good backup, RAID is as flimsy as the walls and if it fails you'll be equally screwed. At least with a foundation (backup), you can rebuild.

No, I'm really not. Apple's engineering is awful. For some references you can go through this video playlist if you're interested; https://www.youtube.com/playli...

This is not even touching on Apple's stance on Right to Repair; they don't publish anything on hardware-level repairs or diagnostics while other OEM's like Dell and Lenovo publish repair manuals for every one of their platforms. They have also lobbied repeatedly against right-to-repair legislation in order to make sure that when their under-engineered products actually do fail you have little choice but to replace.

Oh, and then there's the orphaning of platforms that are only a few years old; a Macbook from 2012 won't be allowed to run Mac OS Big Sur... note that I said allowed because there's probably no technical reason they wouldn't be able to make it run even with some reduced functionality But they're doing it so people are forced to buy a new laptop. Assuming said laptop still works. And here I am with a circa 2010 Alienware on the desk behind me running the latest Windows 10 and doing sterling service as a workstation in my lab environment with zero reduced functionality and with a more modern SSD actually runs pretty fast. The only reason it's not still a daily driver is because the WiFi card is no longer supported in Windows 10 and the screen is low res (1366x768) for my preference... but I am also fully aware that I can replace that WiFi card with a supported one and it'd be more than usable as a spare laptop if I needed it.

Check the rest of Louis' channel as well; it's really interesting stuff for people who are interested in the engineering behind computers.

Not to mention the capital expense of additional equipment not provided for home workers. Things like desks, chairs, monitors etc. that really do add up incredibly quickly. And they're not just a fixed one-time expense because these things wear out. My office chair is about dead after a decade of working from home and I am going to have to replace it soon. I replaced my desk just a few months ago because I needed more space to work given changes in my job and my old one was stifling.

Working from home saves corporations money... not individuals. Despite not having to commute, few people in the USA at least can actually function without a car due to virtually nonexistent public transport so they don't save money on a car payment. They do save money on fuel, but that's not the only expense with cars; there's still insurance and maintenance that doesn't stop because the car's not being used as often. And as you pointed out most people transitioning to permanent WFH might have to consider a dedicated office space.

Just as a side note though; you don't have to get a whole new house for the dedicated office... there are dedicated "office sheds" (one example here; https://www.studio-shed.com/ho...) that you can buy and put into your back yard. Yes, you'll need to run facilities like electric but they can be cost-effective if you don't want to move :)