treenutz68 I wonder though when he speaks about apple device privacy, if he is talking about using it in the way most people do (with icloud, location services always on, bluetooth and wifi always on, etc...) or how that may be different if you follow some privacy best practices with an iPhone
He somewhat addresses that with a few sentences, because the gist of it is that Apple controls the hardware, OS, core apps and access to everything. You simply can't escape Apple on an iPhone without bricking it. Their practices of tracking you in their own apps despite you revoking consent, or that they just redefine the dictionary meaning of "tracking" so they can claim to let you disable tracking of third party apps, are very deceiving. Those facts plus the Hong Kong example plus many other actions (e.g. anti right to repair practices, standard setups of iCloud etc.) are more than enough for me to not trust Apple. I don't need to go into conspiracy theories in order to get a pretty solid impression on Apple being in it for the money and only for the money (like every other big tech company). They will not hesitate to monetize you wherever they can get away with it, no matter what they tell in their very well crafted marketing material.
Google is by no means better when it comes to privacy, but Google only controls their Play Services since they needed a quick answer to the iPhone and opted for the readily available AOSP instead of building from scratch. It just happens to be a lucky situation for us that it's more profitable for Google to work with an open system and invite other developers and vendors to change things and support their OS, which is where great teams like the GOS developers can chime in. Could you imagine Apple allowing the GOS team to improve their system and remove all Apple telemetry?
To put it in one sentence: Using Apple products (or unmodified Google products) to me is living in a hostile relationship with a narcissist that exploits me whenever possible, but gives me nice things and experiences here and there to bind me.
The greatest power we have is educating ourselves and making informed decisions based on our threat models. I'm not saying you shouldn't use Apple products, they can be a great fit, but don't get fooled by their privacy campaigns. Like any other investor money driven company, they would throw you in front of a bus if it means profit to them. Make use of the powers you have (education and choice) and you'll be back in control of your individual privacy fulfillment.