If it’s going to really save a significant amount of data center resources, then it’s also probably going to reduce the battery lifespan of all these devices significantly. That may probably be good for Apple’s bottom line temporarily, but it will hurt in the long run. I’d imagine it’d be a lot easier to optimize the data center compute resources than optimizing the scanning on individual devices and not trashing battery lifespan.

> I’d imagine it’d be a lot easier to optimize the data center compute resources than optimizing the scanning on individual devices and not trashing battery lifespan.

No amount of data center optimization will beat running computations on hundreds of millions of devices other people have to pay for.

If that’s a valid reason to steal electricity and compute resources from your customers, then why not go the whole way and use all the Mac’s as storage and compute for iCloud?