They do, so far. I test these machines for privacy claims as a hobby and have been a bit surprised to find Apple stuff mostly delivering on those claims. I’m used to seeing a lot of dark patterns in testing and it’s made me expect the worst, but so far they’ve followed through on (in particular) their end-to-end encryption and on-device processing guarantees. Security audit failures so far have appeared to be engineering oversights, and the ones I reported have been patched already.

The majority of user data they collect appears to be optional analytics and diagnostics that are properly encrypted and anonymized using the same pooling strategy used for their built-in VPN service. They recently started doing processing off-device for some new features related to the Apple intelligence thing (I haven’t gotten around to testing most of that) but otherwise anything siri-related is indeed processed locally. You can toggle a setting to allow anonymized siri recordings to be sent to Apple for quality control but they ask you permission each time you reset a device and re-confirm when you install updates, which IMO is adequate.

The other guy who commented here is talking out his ass. I used to give guys like that the benefit of the doubt but I’m done with them. Truth doesn’t matter to them. There are good reasons to hate Apple, such as the fact that it’s a massive soulless corporation raping the planet to make luxury electronics for affluent consumers, but for most of the rabid apple haters I find online the reasons appear to be far more selfish and petty than that. In this case, the guy is just a contrarian who likes pretending to know things, which is why he hawks conspiracy theories on lemmy for guaranteed upvotes.