I think their buisiness model is instead to back up your files to iCloud, not the hard drive key. Which also protects drive losses like theft and drive failure,

I think their buisiness model is instead to back up your files to iCloud, not the hard drive key. Which also protects drive losses like theft and drive failure, and is generally useful for people with multiple machines. They justify charging you a iCloud service fee for this better user experience. From apple’s perspective, hardrive encryption keys aren’t something the average user is going to care about, but files are. The fact that this drives iCloud storage is probably a happy accident ;)