I honestly could not care less what the marketing spin was; internally, we were being told things that we knew to be false.

I'm speaking specifically about the "absolute technical impossibility of providing certain information residing in the iDevice to anyone, even when the request was accompanied by a search warrant", which was the mantra circa 2014. The market differentiator was "we care about user privacy, in stark contrast with Google, who monetizes all data on their devices".

That was horseshit, as a specific security team regularly handled exactly those requests ... and heaven help you if you pointed that out in any discussion with management.

Things look a lot different from the inside.

(edit: s/piracy/privacy/)

[1] Getting into a knock-down-drag-out with the new honcho overseeing CoreOS about us "doubling down on user privacy" was one of the last straws for me. Everybody in the audience was source-disclosed (and some of us had even read the relevant parts :), and the guy had the audacity to claim a certain thing was impossible when we knew that particular thing was not only possible but was being uploaded to the mothership ...

Source: I saw the contents of that tarball, and it was authentic.

[1] Cray employee's self-applied moniker [2] Crayons' description of the period following the acquisition by SGI.

It was originally supposed to prevent a repeat of the Hon Hai Zhengzhou incident where a team of line workers mixed/matched parts from units that failed QC and sold the Frankensteined units on the grey market. (Massively oversimplified, but that's the general gist)

The resulting near-total inability to swap screens/buttons without knowing someone with FDR update access was seen as acceptable collateral damage.