Especially from a privacy record, they actually have a far superior history than essentially every other hardware manufacturer out there.

That’s what their marketing department wants you to believe. But basically all independent investigations into that have concluded that Apple is no better, just that they collect all the data themselves rather than allowing you to have it collected by Facebook etc.

If you look into their privacy policy etc. its very obvious that they exclude all their own surveillance advertisement and privacy invasive stuff from the limits imposed on others. If they truly cared about privacy they would not make these exceptions for themselves.