Even on the windows side you are better off with the 1st party defender features these days.

Enterprise use 3rd party AV for central orchestration and control. Theres no reason for this in consumer land.

The threat detection isn’t meaningfully better across any of them (aside from some being “astonishingly bad”) despite what vendors claim.

The best people to know how to protect your OS are the people that made it.

Seagate are still pretty good? Western Digital/Sandisk are the ones with failing external SSD issues at the moment (same company).

It’s pot luck generally, unfortunately. Even good manufacturers can have a bad batch.

You can get usb-c to c charging cables that tell you the wattage on the cable, no way in iOS itself I know of.

Be aware that charging speed will vary on all devices in accordance with what the battery controller thinks is best at any given time.

+1 for the refurb store. Usually at least a couple of hundred bucks off for an effectively brand new unit in normal packaging with a full warranty.