Ctrl should be on the key that says “CapsLock”, and for me, it is.

You can swap Ctrl and Fn in the BIOS.

My newer model can kernel panic as well as any model!

I had a T470 previously, and the mechanical build quality and materials of the P14s III are superior.

There’s a reason Linux on a Thinkpad is a meme.

You haven’t said much concrete about your requirements, use case, or budget, so I don’t have a recommendation much beyond whatever Thinkpad meets your requirements. The “serious” models in the T, P, and X series tend to be preferable to the others.

I love mine!

I’m used to people trusting friends and family members who they know are tech experts. That’s a really weird reaction that seems disrespectful toward your knowledge and judgment; you weren’t wrong to be mad.

Similar situation, except involving oldies (70+).

Every 70+ family member I have asked to install and use Signal has done so without any assistance or instructions beyond the name of the app to install. It’s one of the easiest tasks in modern information technology.

It always surprises me when anyone resists. It’s 45 seconds worth of effort to install and activate it, and anybody who knows me knows I’m not going to recommend software that will harm them.

Macs have a hardware secure enclave that apps can use to store keys where other apps can’t access them. Apple itself does not seem to be making adequate use of it here.

It’s not clear exactly what Apple is going to impose here. In principle, trying to ensure users understand the implications of a permission is good. In practice, Apple is famous for keeping users from making decisions they might reasonably want to make on phones, and it’s starting to creep into the Mac; installing an app Apple hasn’t signed requires the command line, for example.

I read the article, and I think DickHertz’s comment is pretty much right. The article’s example illustrates the point:

For example, Inc. columnist Jason Aten recently discovered that Meta’s Muse AI assistant somehow had synced his entire local Messages database and was using those messages as context for its tasks.

Aten did not understand that the Messages database is stored on the disk (presumably) unencrypted and readable by anything with full disk access. He got a result he didn’t want because he did not understand the implications of granting that permission, and Apple seeks to add more friction to the process to protect users from making that mistake.