Comment by gigel82

I'm looking for a middle ground. I need to use and trust hardware from vendors like Apple but I use as few of their services as possible (and verify that with firewalls and traffic inspection).

My concern here is with Apple Intelligence and this wishy-washy hybrid approach where some of the time your data is sent to the "private cloud" and some of the time it's processed locally on device. I absolutely hate that and need a big switch in Settings that completely turns off all cloud processing of data; but given how much they're spending on advertising how "private" their cloud is I suspect they plan to not make that optional at all (not just opt-out by default). At that point, all the photos you take might be sent to their cloud for "beautification" or whatever and there's no way to know whether they're also analyzed for other things or sent out to the CCP to make sure you're not participating in a protest against Xi.