story
That's tangibly different.
Example that should be super trivial: try to setup a sync of photos taken on your Iphone to a laptop (Mac or Windows or Linux) without going through Apple's cloud or any other cloud?
With an Android phone and Windows laptop (for example) you simply install the Syncthing app on both and you're done.
My point is not "Apple is worse", instead I'm just trying to point out that Apple definitely seems eager to have their users push a lot of what they do through their cloud. I don't see why their AI will be any different, even if their marketing now claims that it will be "offline" or whatever.
"Sync my files without using Apple's cloud" is not a user requirement. Delivering features using their cloud is a very reasonable way for Apple to provide services.
Now, "Sync my files without compromising my privacy" is a user requirement. And Apple iCloud offers a feature called 'advanced data protection" [1] that end to end encrypts your files, while still supporting photo sharing and syncing. So no, you can't opt out of using their cloud as the intermediary, but you can protect your content from being decrypted by anyone, including Apple, ooff your devices.
It has the downside that it limits your account recovery options if you lose the device where your keys are and screw up on keeping a recovery key, so it isn't turned on by default, but it's there for you to use if you prefer. For many users, the protections of Apple's standard data protection are going to be enough though.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651#:~:text=Advanced%20Da....
The first hit on Google makes it look trivial with iPhone too?
https://support.apple.com/guide/devices-windows/sync-photos-...
> With an Android phone and Windows laptop (for example) you simply install the Syncthing app on both and you're done.
And with iPhone you just install the "Apple Devices" app: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9np83lwlpz9k
Install jottacloud and enable the photos backup feature.
I also sync my photos onto my NAS via sftp, using the Photosync app.
