The exclusive "or" in "do you trust Apple is acting in your best interests, or do you believe they're a malevolent entity?" still makes it a false dichotomy.

> The straw man you cite isn’t a straw man. It is a solid argument.

"if I have the code, build the code, nothing can hide in the code.":

is not something someone knowledgeable would ever claim, only that having the code and building the code will be at least as safe or safer than not having the code at all. Presenting it as "nothing can hide in the code" and then attacking that is, in my opinion, a strawman argument.

> The author used the word ‘feasible’.

And he is correct in that. No single individual can maintain the software integrity of an entire operating system, but a group of people can do so. The omission here is that that group of people need not be Apple.

The argument here is that without Apple taking control of the user's software the user would fall prey to the privacy violating practices of the likes of Google and Microsoft, which is not true. Hence the "lie by omission".

> If that isn’t a loaded term, I don’t know what is.

The term is from the article: "While I'm going to sound like an Apple apologist,"

He claims he is not X, but has given no argument why he shouldn't be considered X and has presented a lot of arguments on why he should be considered X.

He has presented no reason to assume he is not a devoted Apple user, or in his words, an "Apple apologist".

In short, I'm not sure I'm exaggerating, but that I'm willing to disagree on.