Of course and that's constantly being brought out as a huge negative when talking about Google, Facebook, Microsoft data storage. It also needs to be clearly said for Apple as well and not just swiped under the rug underneath corporate marketing.

except apple has the tech to not be able to share it. they use this for some of your data. but intentionally not for icloud.

it’s probably nothing to do with USA law enforcement. my reasonable guess is they don’t care much and would go full private. i think the reason here is china. that way they don’t have to have a separate china policy which would draw undue attention to that point.

If you ask around people feel like they have more privacy when using apple products, yet the truth is they all use iCloud backups, iCloud photos and iCloud drive, none of which are E2EE. Meanwhile, Google does allow for E2EE in cloud Android backups!

iMessage can be MITM’d by Apple when requested by the government and you, the user, will have no way of verifying your correspondent’s public key (unlike whatsapp, signal, keybase etc).