Apple's literal marketing message is that they do all the processing on device. It's not a shift for Apple, as apple has never done this analysis in the past, a

Apple's literal marketing message is that they do all the processing on device. It's not a shift for Apple, as apple has never done this analysis in the past, and only started doing the analysis once it could do it locally. The use cases we're talking about also don't work on a cloud based analysis, as you can't have text selection block on network uploads (generally slower than downloads), and it would require uploading every image you open to apple which would presumably be a lot of traffic, and an obvious privacy nightmare. It would also break for users who turn on the e2ee everything mode for iCloud.