Their modems are crap. The primary function of a phone is to access cellular signal. No thanks.

“My new email address is persen@icloud.com”

Done.

No explanation necessary. Just give people the new address.

(Just used icloud as a bad joke there.)

No, they don’t care about privacy. It is just marketing buzz. They give Google and Facebook access to internal data for money. They give governments access to iCloud data for market share.

They then design the OS full of dark patterns to trick you into enabling iCloud. They have telemetry on every aspect of the operating system from a timeline down to the millisecond as to when and where you opened and closed browser tabs, to what application was consuming power at a given time, to where you go and what bluetooth and wifi devices you saw along the way. Metadata scrapers index the contents of your devices under the guise of making it “smart and helpful.” The health monitor is ostensibly capable of dead reckoning location tracking, and you have to jump through hoops to even shut off BTLE when the phone is off.

Their communications platforms log all sorts of metadata, (this can easily be seen by requesting a GDPR data dump) and if one believes they don’t tee every iMessage conversation off to three letter agencies and who knows where else, one would be sorely mistaken. (This, I don’t know of direct evidence of, so it is more inferred based on how the messaging technologies work and how the government(s) wouldn’t truly allow privacy to exist.)

One can’t even stop their Apple product from talking to Apple servers, as they run access to their own systems on a layer of abstraction above the user’s userspace network layer. If they so choose, they can brick your phone at a moment’s notice using their “activation” infrastructure.

Nothing they do is privacy-oriented, beyond making it slightly difficult for Johnny the bicycle thief to gain access.

All without any of the code being available for inspection.

Literally since the beginning AFAIK. Although they allegedly stopped scanning e-mails for targeted ad data years back: https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-to-stop-scanning-gmail-messages-to-serve-up-ads

I don’t recall seeing ads in the phone app, however, just the webapp, so perhaps that is new? Which makes some kind of dark sense given less people use computers to do things anymore, and every tech company is trying to pull off increasingly maximum grift over the last few years.

The second part, about why sim is not very private, well it has a unique identifier and the technology was specifically designed to pinpoint your location, as this helps keep a good connection.

SIM cards contain authentication keys for the cellular network so it knows who to bill and which cells to send a paging signal over to ring a call. The use of SIM cards does not pinpoint your location, and SIM cards have absolutely nothing to do with keeping a good connection (pSIM or eSIM). The network and handset are constantly re-evaluating signal strength across various bands and modes and the network tells the handset to switch to what works while moving about the network. The SIM just auths the user account. It is ostensibly a key to your service, nothing more.

All the network band/mode hunting will continue with or without a SIM card, the phone would just be limited to emergency calls in that state.