I think that you're viewing the past through rose-colored glasses a little. Steve Jobs' entire strategy was a headless system with everything in the cloud. It w

I think that you're viewing the past through rose-colored glasses a little. Steve Jobs' entire strategy was a headless system with everything in the cloud. It was the entire push for iTools (which then became .Mac, then MobileMe, and finally iCloud) and those were released in 2000. The idea was that you could sign in on any Mac and always have access to your personal info and, at one point, even sign in and see the desktop of any of your machines ("Back to My Mac", a feature I miss every day). It only started as one machine being the "ground truth", as you say, because there had to be one starting point to sync from. That being said, I'll give you that it might be trivial to sync Notes (one-way, at least) via cable. I believe, based on nothing other than my interpretation of history, that the reason this stopped is not to force cloud adoption but that it's just not that in-demand of a feature. The biggest issue with cable-based syncing is that you have to resolve conflicts manually and the iCloud solution doesn't need that at all. It's not a trivial thing to implement, in my opinion, especially if you have to factor in anyone that has multiple Macs, iPads, or any other device that could potentially sync Notes. That being said... I'm doing exactly what you're describing in syncing everything to my own cloud on my NAS but at the expense of getting to use the native apps on MacOS and my other devices. I still use the iCloud stuff for backups of data on a specific account but I feel like the reason these things are going to continue to be "wontfix" (you give away your dev-ness) is because the majority of people love the convenience of simple syncing that they don't have to actively think about. Apple also does just enough on the privacy and security front to make it worthwhile for a good chunk of techies too.