The new AI features will be available on the iPad Air I just ordered, and on my M1 MacBook Air, and I'll be able to play with them there until I'm ready to upgrade my phone. I think these new features sound great, but I'm not in any hurry to adopt them wholesale.
And if you don’t like them you don’t have to use them. I don’t use Siri and it doesn’t bother me that Apple includes it on all their machines.
That's likely true. Unless you were careful to do a lot more than just disabling it, it does use you though, slurping up quite a bit of data.
Separately, the data Siri sends isn't held to the same differential privacy standards as some of Apple's other diagnostics. They just give you a unique ID and yolo it [1]. Unless personalized device behaviors are somehow less identifiable than all the other classes of data subject to deanonymization attacks (demographics, software/hardware version fingerprints, ...), that unique ID is just to be able to pretend to the courts that they tried (give or take Hanlon's razor).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927657
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/ask-siri-dictati...