My understanding is that the T2 chip and storage works like how the iPhone does. Everything on flash is encrypted but you have system data and user data. The ke

My understanding is that the T2 chip and storage works like how the iPhone does. Everything on flash is encrypted but you have system data and user data. The keys to system data are unlocked during the boot process (the T2 also replaces the SMC so it also handles the POST). User data is encrypted with different keys (which are probably locked with the users password). This way the machine can boot without a password (like how on a iPhone you don’t enter your passcode until the phone has finished booting). If you were to replicate that hand shake between the OS and chip, sure apple could have created a “lifeboat connector” on T2 based macs. However the “isolated island” of the PCB communicates with would get more complex (you don’t want to be back powering the whole board from the connector, if there was a simple short on the board somewhere which was preventing the machine from powering on, then with no isolation you could be also “powering that short” from the lifeboat connector and be unable to recover data without more work. On M1 MacBooks things have been stepped up a notch. The Application processor and the security processor that handles the encryption are now the same chip, so you would have to power a “whole lot more”. To top it off the flash chip which is to your SSD and the RAM chip are on the same package as the M1 unit as one big System On Chip. Think of it like this, it’s like if a Intel I7 processor also had the ram and SSD on that chip you brought when you built your machine. Now it’s a lot more harder to create a lifeboat connector. Not impossible but harder. Now as Apple will have a lot of data on their own repair program they can look into how often they were able to / could be bothered to recover data off their older models and how much it pissed the customer off and probably decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. If I were giving them the benefit of the doubt. They think their customers data will be more secure without it. But it’s another reason why right to repair is important. As we have seen with phones, people are willing to write off the phone and pay decent cash to recover the pictures of their kids they had on their phones. With schematics, 3rd parties could much easier create tools and fixes to get the SOC in a workable state just long enough to recover data (Apple R&D prob even have have test boards where they can swap the SOC, If the SOC, Ram, Flash are all ok and not had LCD backlight voltage sent down the data lines... And recover the data. But their "repair techs" have to now learn how to remove the SOC package from the main board). If the chip that contains the keys itself is dead, even with all documentation and access to parts you wanted, you are SOL as these chips are typically designed to create the keys on chip and never let them out.