I’m not so sure. If you read back up that thread, the thought that triggered it was from qzervaas:

   Apple's already shown they don't like this behaviour with their randomised MAC addresses in iOS 8+.

And elsewhere in the thread people called out the fact apple had already introduced support for ad blocking. So Apple’s privacy-positive posture was already in the air.

I think there is a sense in which privacy was already a differentiator for Apple in iOS (as contrasted with Google’s motives in android in particular of course) - so this did feel like a not completely implausible way they could go to double down on that differentiator.

Steve Jobs talking about this at D8 in 2010, and of course the privacy features he talks about were baked into the OS APIs from the start.

Apple's rift with Google over user data collection in Google Maps goes back to 2009 when Google held Apple to ransom for the user data in return for turn-by-turn directions. Apple refused and started building their own maps service, buying Placebase in July that year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo

If anyone's interested in reading more, here's an article which discusses why Apple switched from Google Maps:

http://allthingsd.com/20120926/apple-google-maps-talks-crash...

I actually wrote a deep dive on Apple’s pivot to privacy. https://saturation.substack.com/p/apple-facebook-and-the-glo...

It's really not about privacy though, the insight needed (not that I'm saying it was easy to make this particular prediction) is that Apple is all about the Walled Garden. It can't be Tor because Apple doesn't own Tor, and so that's not inside the Walled Garden, whereas "Apple Undercover" even if it were functionally no better or worse than Tor, is magically blessed by the Apple branding. And Apple have been all about Walled Gardens for decades.

Tor has reputation problems. Lots of services block tor exit nodes because of all the abuse that comes from them.

By making it a feature for paying subscribers only, Apple probably hopes that their solution won't be interesting for criminals. (Apple will likely cooperate with law enforcement)

Using Tor would be an insane choice for 99% of Apple users.

"Oh, let me turn on undercover... why is my bank online account suspended and my PayPal banned?"