You may have overlooked that apple is a hardware company, services they offer are complementary to the hardware they sell. Their incentives follows what sells m

You may have overlooked that apple is a hardware company, services they offer are complementary to the hardware they sell. Their incentives follows what sells more hardware. If forfeiting icloud privacy gives them access to a billion new hardware customers (hello China!) as iphone sales are dwindling, do you really believe they will stick behind icloud privacy ? The point being that they may have more incentive to break their privacy promises than you think. But still, at the moment apple being a hugely succesful hardware company gives it less incentives than say an advertising network (hello google), a "give us all your data and we'll make it available online for you, also ads" (hello facebook Inc.) as their revenue depends mostly on hardware not on ads or software licencing or investor story time. This may change when profits and sales go down, we have already witnessed other hardware vendors making moves such as lowering item sale price with a strategy to recoup the loss with exploiting/reselling user data later (hello samsung).