You live in the United States of America, which has had Google, Microsoft and Apple under it's thumb since Snowden's leaks. If you want to insinuate that Apple protects you against state-level actors, you should disprove that or at least refute their own transparency page[0].

> the grumbling from software vendors indicates it's reasonably effective.

If not the software vendors, who are you trusting to keep your best interests at-heart here?

[0] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/