Worse performance is definitely not from lacking data. They have more than enough data to make the kind of dense samples needed for ML; remember that ML is abou

Worse performance is definitely not from lacking data. They have more than enough data to make the kind of dense samples needed for ML; remember that ML is about sampling and fitting a generalization to some population, not collecting all the data from every person and overfitting to it. It's more likely lacking infrastructure, which OP alluded to. ML requires infrastructure that companies like FB/Amazon/Google naturally possess. Apple is playing catch-up. Other comment also mentioned that Google et al anonymize data, and have options to opt-out of data collection. We don't have evidence that they are necessarily worse at privacy than Apple (they could be, we just can't know for sure unless you work there and happen to know exactly how it all goes down). Apple has data on you too. They're just worse at making use of it (and you can argue less incentivized but I don't know -- getting people to use apple-only products is a pretty strong incentive to make things work well, and Siri/Apple Maps don't work that well).