> Please spell out the implication of that claim for me then.
I'll spell out my views below, but I want to start by noting that I don't agree with the way you've characterized them. Going all the way back to your initial reply, I don't like the way this leading question was phrased:
> What specific features do you allege exist just to mislead the general public?
I think Hanlon's razor is a false dilemma. With a big company like Apple, there's typically a combination of bureaucratic incompetence and marketing exaggeration. Clearly, Apple leadership has decided to make privacy a consumer differentiator for their products, so they have a financial incentive to hype privacy features as much as possible. As a consequence, Apple management would be eager to be pitched any and all privacy features from engineering; these may even lead to bonuses and promotions, though that's purely speculation on my part. Regardless of the personal motivations of employees, the company is pursuing privacy features in earnest and isn't intending for them to be fake. Nonetheless, the company also has the unfortunate habit of shipping half-baked features and implementations. This is driven largely by the artificial, forced march of the annual release schedule, which demands that great new features be continually announced at a certain time, whether they're ready or not. The situation is not unique to privacy features either; Apple's entire software product line is suffering in quality. Engineering simply doesn't have enough time to do things right, which results in new features that are superficial and/or flawed. You could say it's marketing-driven incompetence.
Several commenters have mentioned that all software has bugs, as if that were somehow profound, or as if I were somehow ignorant of software development as a software developer. (I actually had to spend some time fixing a bug before I wrote this reply.) But not all bugs are created equal. From my perspective, a bug that's discovered relatively quickly by someone else is worse than a bug that's discovered only years later, in the sense that it suggests insufficient QA on the part of the developers, who themselves should have noticed the bug before it shipped. And a bug in the primary functionality of a product or feature is worse than a bug in a more obscure part of the software. This is why I'm not impressed by the length of time since a bug was fixed; if a feature or product was shipped with an obvious, fundamental flaw in its main functionality, that's a stain on the reputation of the developers. And if they keep making such mistakes, why should you ever trust them to be competent? No bug fix can fix the bug writers.
I don't want to focus too much on iCloud Private Relay, though. It wasn't what I had in mind when I was writing my original comment, and I don't even use iCloud Private Relay myself. I mostly don't use a VPN, except on rare occasions. I've discussed iCloud Private Relay here only because you asked me about it.
It's been a busy afternoon/evening for me, so I've kind of run out of steam now on this comment, but I promised I would reply.