Nah I thought that was the case too. Turns out it is not. Had a clients employee as me for help w/ her iphone about 2 weeks back. 32gb phone, no storage space left on device so it legit just stopped working, wouldnt recieve texts or anything cus it was full. So clients like, help me get photos off phone onto a USB or set photos to store in icloud only and ill delete the phone copies (well this is what I thought was an option because I can do it w/ just about every other backup software I use). Turns out big fat nup to either options. Only way she could delete phone photos but keep cloud ones was to disable sync entirely (lol wtf is the point of linked cloud if sync is so shithouse?). Plug phone into itunes, all you get re. access to device is no ability to view pics as files too extract, you cant even control apps on the device (good luck finding out what apple referred to as other apple software that used up >30% of phones internal space it just gets all lumped in under one grey color of storage being used.

Got forced to use a iphone 11 or someshit a few years back as a company issued device. Man it was alright at making phone calls, complete POS for doing any actual work on. Basically found it to be an overpriced paperweight that could take ok photos but was impossible to retrieve photos from. No i dont want a icloud account or any of that bs i just want to plug in to pc and pull files like I've been doing for 25+ years on every other platform ive ever used.