Comment by Nextgrid
> I bet Apple doesn't conveniently change settings in favor of data collection on a regular basis
Not to the level of Microsoft, but initially Apple Intelligence would default to on and you'd have to disable it (thankfully it needs to download gigabytes worth of ML models, which gives you a few minutes after initial OS install to toggle it off before it activates). For a while after every OS update you'd also have an onboarding screen that would try to pitch it to you with an option to "skip" in the fine print (I don't want to "skip", I want a "fuck off forever" option personally).
My personal solution for my Macbook, which hasn't failed yet, is to simply wait a year or two to apply OS updates. In this case, I'm extending that to "never". I'll take my chances with the script kiddies, who have way fewer resources to infect my machine with malware than my OS vendor apparently does.