Does Apple really have literally all telemetry disabled by default, out of the box, on all devices? Is there an independent audit proving that? If so, I would buy all their products in an instant.

Then how do they know what to fix/improve without that? I can't imagine average iOS/OSX users, who aren't devs, are writing and submitting detailed bug/crash reports on a regular basis.

Or is it just bias and personal preference where "I don't mind Apple collecting my telemetry because I like Apple but Microsoft collecting my telemetry is evil because I hate Microsoft"?

I don't have a dog in this fight but don't trust any for-profit company when it comes to privacy, no matter how good their PR is on the matter, especially since both of them(and most SV companies) were part of the NSA Prism bulk collection program[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

Apple gives you the option to turn telemetry on/off as part of the machine setup & OS upgrade process. This option is explained in simple english and not buried in the legalese.

The question is, is the telemetry really off completely on mac or either?

Is there any guarantee that Apple gets zero bytes of your data or do we just take their word for it because their products are shiny and cool?

Those questions apply to literally every computer.

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5706

No hacker would trust Apple, or an independent audit, to make such a claim anyway.

There's a conundrum that requires further investigation which is the intertwining of the concepts of privacy and security and how in order to increase security protections of their products there must be a decrease of privacy. Security requires a probing knowledge of the details of what is running on the device.

The same information that can contribute to increased security for the end user is also valuable to sell to advertisers if, delightfully ironically, the security vendor is ok sharing private information with said advertisers.

you can't apply nearly the same heavy accusations on canonical as you do on MS and apple, cannonical makes the glut of its money from ubuntu server. The os is just a byproduct, if you really want to get technical, you could say that ubuntu popcon tracks you, but you can disable that from the package manager settings, because "oh no! they have anonymized package usage records of me!"