They're backdoors because they allow for remote access[1] and we (as in the users who ostensibly "own" our own devices) can't turn them off without going throug

They're backdoors because they allow for remote access[1] and we (as in the users who ostensibly "own" our own devices) can't turn them off without going through great difficulty. Please read the piece linked above on Computrace. I am not very familiar with the inner workings of Find My Mac and other AppleID-associated features but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that those features 1. don't involve injecting code into system processes in the exact same manner as a BIOS-level rootkit and 2. aren't preactivated without the owner's knowledge or consent so the attack surface they create is likely much smaller than that of something like Computrace. Also, if you like, please elaborate on why the economy of scale argument is "obvious". [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/intel-patches-remote-code-execution-bug-that-lurked-in-cpus-for-10-years/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/intel... Edit: Management coprocessors are also rightly called backdoors because they operate below ring 0 meaning that if we cannot trust them (and we can't because they are largely black boxes to us) then we cannot trust our systems as a whole.