> There really is nobody left eh?

Linux, on the most open hardware you can find? That's about all I'm willing to use anymore, and if that closes, I'll find something else to do with my life. I keep coming back to, "I cannot defend modern consumer electronics from any ethical starting point I pick." They're built on the backs of slave labor, using materials extracted in "What toxic sludge pile about to collapse?" conditions, used to extract behavioral data for tech overlord profits (I've never been a tech overlord, but I certainly have worked for some of those companies over the years), and then get burned in third world countries when they're artificially obsoleted because you ought to buy a new one for more profits. Yay?

> Still can't be too thin a client, just in case I have poor network, but it seems like one of the best ways to get portability + privacy + power nowadays.

It depends what you're doing, but I don't really need much power "on the go" in my life anymore. The PineBook Pro is remarkably useful for portable light use, and at $200 and "way more open hardware than anything x86 or Apple," it's not a bad little system. It's also quite repariable, though they're less durable than I'd really prefer.

> But I'm also trying to be careful to do proper threat modeling [1] so that I don't burn out, as the rabbit hole goes very deep.

The rabbit hole goes very deep indeed. The threat modeling is hard when the very foundations of modern computing (process isolation) are cracked and crumbling. If you told someone that VMs were a hard isolation boundary in the Haswell days, you'd have been quite wrong (L1TF). You just wouldn't have known it for a few years yet. The burnout is real, and I'm not convinced it's a bad thing, really. There are a lot of deep technical types I know in my general peer group (call it "mid 30s to mid 40s, have grown up with this stuff, have done it professionally their entire post-college lives") who more and more want no part of what we call consumer electronics, and are doing things like "buying plots of fruit trees" and "no longer carrying smartphones." There will be an entire group of "gentleman farmers who run oddly Amish-seeming farms" in the next decade, and they'll be former security and low level tech types.

The threat modeling from a security perspective is hard, but from a behavioral surplus perspective, it's simple enough: "If there is a way something can be collected, it is being collected. If you can't envision a way something can be collected, odds are very good that someone smarter than you has been paid very well to figure out how to collect it anyway."

Buy some Field Notes pocket notebooks, carry those instead of a smartphone. I now regularly go out for entire days without a cell phone on me, and with a mechanical watch. It's nice, and I suggest getting in the habit.

> it makes me think maybe I don't really need that M1 after all

Vote with your wallet. If you object to Apple's CSAM stuff with your words, and buy a M1 with your actions, you don't really object that much - actions speaking louder than words and all.

The forum attached to my blog has a small collection of people working through this stuff as well. You're quite welcome to join there!