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Comment by xuhu | Hacker News Reader

I guess stolen laptops with OS X are a lot more likely to be recovered simply because there are fewer (pirated) OS X install disks laying around, so the thieves eventually cave in and just let them boot up.

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But there is this one thing which is bugging me and my sister. We haven't actually used a Mac system so this may be a stupid question. The laptop was stolen right? and everybody (excluding me) sets a password to their logins. How did the thief get the password?

The article in question is about a stolen desktop that booted into single user mode.

It's not actually single user mode but autologin, that is why the stolen computer user was still using the same browser and keychain as he didn't have access to admin rights.

The laptop booted straight to the desktop. The user lambasted by the hacker simply isn't "a computer guy", hardly a sin.

macbook (pro|air) is just a x86 PC, you can install pretty much anything onto it, it doesn't have to be Mac OS X.

also, with unibody macbook (pro)'s it's trivial to replace HDD/SDD.

Despite x86 compatibility, a large part of the value of Apple laptops comes from the fact that they are able to easily run OS X. It would be extremely difficult to sell an Apple laptop that did not come with the operating system preinstalled, since most of the potential buyers would expect to be able to run OS X. Replacing the hard drive would not help in this circumstance.

You could install Windows on it, but wouldn't that require Boot Camp to be set up first?

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