Obviously I'm not an Apple customer, but from reading hackernews comments when the M1 came out, I was reading people discussing that you couldn't do that. Or maybe I misunderstood the details but they were definitely complaining about backup methods for encrypted laptops.

I would not trust Apple with all my data, which is essentially what you're doing if they have the key.

Can you do a full-disk encrypted backup of your drive using only your own keys and not sending any data back to Apple?

If you can, then I'm wrong. But "outright lie" is an uncharitable interpretation of my error.

Lol, downvoted with no answers. Apple victims are a thin-skinned bunch.

They could be referring to iPhone, couldn't they? Which to my knowledge doesn't have Time Machine, a macOS feature.

I think it's best not to say something is a "lie" unless you have a strong basis for it, let alone asserting it is a "outright lie".

A lie is an intentionally false statement. It involves an intention to deceive. It's highly unlikely that someone on Hacker News would set out to intentionally mislead people who are familiar with the subject-matter and who know how to fact check.

At best they are "wrong", "misinformed" or "mistaken". Although, as said in the first paragraph, I suspect you're actually at cross-purposes with each other.