I actually have an old phone that I used as a remote-control for my home-threater PC. No connectivity needed, but the phone did everything I needed. Move the mouse, act as a keyboard, and mostly raise volume / change channel.

Phones are computers. Even if you remote all connectivity to the outside world, they still function as well as any PC from the early 90s (or earlier). A huge amount of compute power, tons of storage, etc. etc.

Its not, at least not based on how the OG article is written. If you open your bank app it automatically tries to log you in if you saved your credentials in the past. This seems to say that if you don't use the app for a week it'll wipe that out. No one expects that.

Let's say you use an app that allows you to add Todos. You've added 30 Todos. No internet needed, it's always just worked. You go on vacation for 10 days. You get back, you open your app. No Todos...all gone. Very simple use case that is now broken.

Yes, you as the user could wipe those out. But now Apple is doing it just because you didn't use it in 7 days. And the user will not blame Apple, they won't even know Apple did that. They will blame the app developer, who in the interest of privacy didn't want to push your personal Todos to a database online.

Again, just a contrived example, please don't go down the road of why a server should have been used. Let's stick to the use case described.