The tech adviser I spoke with at the “Genius Bar” didn’t even attempt an actual wiping and reloading of the system through disk recovery (I was not able to access this function). She clicked through settings to erase and reinstall the operating system. She couldn’t identify who at apple may be able to observe the activity monitor and ID anything malicious and not part of apple OS…She was an idiot in that she offered the tech support anyone at home can attempt, without any knowledge at all.
Someone coded my MacBook to be in enterprise system with me as a front end admin only, assigned back end admins with full authority, set rules for the system to never fully shut down or sleep, mirrored my screen to capture work info and whatever boring info I possess privately, and connected the system to a remote network linked to a remote PC. I saw the human “do the thing” (change my admin settings and system settings in Sudo to access remotely) , but again, trusted friend was making some “adjustments” to the Mac to get it to work better with the wifi (derp). I didn’t even ask. I don’t click on suspicious anything, but should choose better friends. Close friend AND a network/cloud engineer.
Anyway, cyber risk not with apple (shockingly apple doesn’t have any such thing) was the source of advising the Mac and phone are at risk of further hacking due to have the registry? details. There was a breach of my work NDS by logging on via the Mac, also.
Going even further back: My router was hacked by friend knowing the password, devices were named as other devices, assigned faux MAC #s, then I later bypassed the crappy router, added google mesh-which was then evil twin hacked (this one was my bad-had not a clue what it was), and of course, the iPhone and MacBook were also…hacked. In person. I discovered all of this at the same time, I promise I am not that blind. Soon to be ex removed wired devices (masked as other devices) from the router and…here we are.
Remote access to both Mac and iPhones (have had 3 since iCloud breach), and the longevity of the access via iCloud account (back to at least 2017, likely 2014), mean (from your comments) that I have to keep my compromised iCloud separate from the new/clean devices moving forward and start with a new account. Not a big deal, I suppose. I’m still worried about the MacBook. I’ll take your word for it unless I find otherwise, however. I’d rather not toss this thing in the trash. Thanks!