I have a general distrust of device manufacturers nowadays. Seeing how far some other devices go (phones and smart TVs especially), I think it's a healthy attit

I have a general distrust of device manufacturers nowadays. Seeing how far some other devices go (phones and smart TVs especially), I think it's a healthy attitude to have. To give you an example, I recently implemented an allowlist on my firewall so only approved devices can access my WAN. I immediately started seeing frequent dropped packets from my wireless access point (Netgear Nighthawk AX200) and switch (Ubiquiti UniFi 8-port PoE) to Netgear and AWS IPs respectively. While some of that is probably them checking for updates, the volume didn't really seem warranted. Going back to Apple though... sure, that's the exact reason why I switched. They already charge a premium, so they have less of an incentive to pad their quarterly earnings selling data. But they're still a company, still responding to shareholders, and they already collect certain amount of analytics. There's not that much of a jump from there to selling it, so being careful and mistrusting is probably a good thing IMO.