Apple makes money on their HW and their media sales and application sales. You have to spend the money by choice for Apple to make money. What does most of the world pay Google for? At Google you are the product. Why is that so hard for everyone to understand. The same goes for FB.

Just because you pay for something doesn't make the incentives to screw you over to get even more money go away.

Does it? Various user-blaming shenanigans, when Apple messes up their HW design can serve as an example. "You're holding it wrong", "You're putting the phone in your pocket", "You're using keyboard wrong in a real world with dust and stuff", etc.

> At Google you are the product.

Nothing prevent Microsoft to sells Windows Home/Pro as beta version of Enterprise and gets money & free QA.

If you pays money nothing guarantee your personal data will be used too.

That is mostly true, people are generally concerned with the way Windows 10 handles disabling telemetry and other privacy concerns such as automatically reinstalling or reenabling 'features' after updates. In addition you get the bonus of having ads in your start menu by default, a mess of features/software you can't remove and opting out of everything is quite the process.

You can of course sniff your network traffic to see what does get collected, and that way you at least know what they collected and you can imagine how it can be used and abused.

I don't see a big difference, I would trust my data with the competent one. Especially when I look at Apple / China situation. It just shows what their actual focus is.

This is the case with all these corporations, making money is their primary concern. In addition their options are 'comply to our laws if you want to sell your products here' or 'no selling on this market'. Not justifying their actions, this just isn't a uniquely Apple thing.

> Apple makes money on their HW and their media sales and application sales.

I don't see why they can't make some extra by making you the product as well.

Also, people who are into Apple are known to be willing to pay for stuff. A very lucrative group for everyone.

Please, be serious for a moment. It would have to be an amount of money to be worth the risk and therefore show up in quarterlies. Also there would have to be a buyer. And there would have to be a bunch of companies Apple shopped their data to. And thousands of employees and ex-employees. You really think Apple could keep a thousand ex-employees quiet? Think about it for a moment—if they were doing it, its leaking would be a certainty.

And if it leaked, Apple would be in very deep doo-doo with easily the largest class action the company has ever been hit with. It would be an unacceptable risk to even contemplate such a stupid idea. All for what, a few extra pennies?

HP is making money on HW. They are also making money from your data.

Adobe is making money from selling software. They also make money from their telemetry system.

etc...

You can easily argue that Apple unlike those others hasn't shown signs in the direction of selling your personal data (directly or indirectly).

Google is an advertisement platform so they are the most experienced in using and selling your data (indirectly).

Microsoft is moving heavily in the SaaS direction with an insane amount of telemetry going out towards their servers from Windows 10. (If you have any concern for your privacy you will have to either disable that via powershell or 3rd party scripts/applications and verify that after every update it is still disabled.)

Facebook is infamous for their facebook pixel, they're looked upon as invading the privacy of everyone in multiple ways. So they're rightfully looked upon as an evil. They've sold and continu to sell private data directly and indirectly, including people who are not on their platform.

Finally Apple doesn't make their money using your private data (at least not on the same scale as those other companies mentioned). So you can view them as the least evil, at least when it comes to private data.

its so disingenuous to equate telemetry with tracking. The former is looking for app crashes, usability patterns and the latter is watching "what interests you" soas to serve you more of that. There is no reason to believe Microsoft is using Windows telemetry crash/threat data to shape Bing ad targeting. (Yes I understand browsing history is part of the overall telemetry. Microsoft would be smart to brand that separately than diagnostic data.)

The other main use of telemetry is to power active threat protection. Having it turned on on more machines makes everyone safer.