Apple is promoting privacy is a key feature of their products; I’m really pleased to see that, it’s a feature worth maintaining. Much of the commentry on the announcements made at WWDC last month assumes that “normal” people don’t care about this stuff, it’s just a nerd issue, but I really don’t believe that’s the case. Just mention searching for products to your non-technical friends and family to see how long it is before they (rightly) grumble about all the targeted ads which start to appear for what they’ve been searching for. Apple are right to be sticking to this, talking about it, and promoting it as a point of difference between them and Google.
That doesn’t give them any excuse not to have the best products. Google Now has a big headstart on Apple’s personalisation, and much of the tech press suggests that Apple can’t catch up if it does all this work on the users devices, as opposed to a server farm in a datacentre. I disagree - our phones, tablets, and computers are so powerful now, that making the connections between data is easily possible on devices. It can’t stay siloed, it needs to be kept in sync between our devices just like everything else we create, but more than ever that could be done without centrally trawling through all our data.