If Apple is leasing physical servers from Amazon, without Amazon further involved in running them (other than dealing with hardware issues), then this argument holds water. Otherwise it doesn’t, even if they’re using Amazon VMs or some higher level services. A VM hosted on someone else’s physical platform is not an “own servers” in this context (which is who has access to the data).

I know HN is very imbued with the cloud approach, and maybe from that perspective running your own servers is just so unthinkable it may as well not exist at all, you don’t get to change how language works. If someone says they’re running on “their own servers” that always means the whole stack including physical and up.

Ownership is determined not only by who pays for it, but also who has direct access to the actual devices.