The Popup That Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
18 points by FedericoSchonborn
18 points by FedericoSchonborn
It's not the content — it's the slop wording (that makes this annoying to read). It feels like mankind has forgotten how to write.
That was always going to be the case. Google's press release was just a way to help a cagey customer save face. The M2 Ultra derived servers Apple built for the earlier, vaporware iteration of Apple Intelligence simply don't have enough power to run a frontier model like Gemini, and for the most part haven't even been racked due to lack of uptake, according to The Information: https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-reportedly-sitting-unused-on-warehouse-shelves-due-to-low-apple-intelligence-usage/
As for the private cloud compute specifics, those are perfectly standard confidential computing (Trusted Execution Environment, TEE) features of Apple, AMD and Nvidia hardware meant for sensitive customers like governments or banks, and not at all specific to Apple. They also have a dismal record of CVEs, not surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the long string of speculative execution vulnerabilities. At best Google wrote a provisioning layer for Apple to use those hardware capabilities. Someone like David Chisnall, who led a similar cloud confidentiality effort at Azure, could shed light on what's involved.
In any case, Apple is an advertising company (all those Services revenues Tim Cook likes to gloat about, that and the App Store tax), and trusting in their privacy marketing is the height of naivety.
Why should I trust Apple's hardware more than I trust Google's hardware? I think it's better for the system overall when privacy doesn't depend on which computers are being used to process the data.