On the one hand it has some pretty nice security features, decent hardware (although the effort for disassembling / fixing is higher than other laptops – and the insistence of soldering memory / storage to the mainboard is also annoying).

On the other hand, when using LuLu (a very nice free and open source application firewall for MacOS), one can see that there are dozens of Apple processes which want to talk to the network and it’s hard to understand the purpose of each :(. It’s safe to assume that Apple has very detailed telemetry about each of their devices which is out there.

Well, at least there are the APIs to implement a firewall like LuLu.

PS. Since this is an older machine, I had to install AppTamer and TB Switcher to avoid overheating (yes, I also repasted the CPU/GPU), and, surprise surprise, one of the processes using the most CPU is “siriactionsd” even though I disabled every option related to Siri I could find. So, MacOS also has it’s own type of bloat, like Windows…