I think their point is that a simple infra red sensor like outdoor motion detector lights will do what you need. There's zero need for a camera to do this. Massive, massive overkill.

Motion sensor is not the same as a presence sensor. Presence sensors often include a PIR sensor in addition to several other sensors to detect if someone is in an area.

I recently installed a basic flat, round, white LED overhead ceiling light in a bedroom that's been repurposed as a home office (replacing a very old dual screw-bulb center of ceiling fixture on the octagon box), and I don't know if there's any actual savings in the new unit. The previous thing had two "same size/shape as an incandescent" 11 or 12 watt white LED "bulbs" in it, the new unit is specced at 28W. It provides a more evenly distributed light and has a toggle switch to choose between three different color temperatures.

At $0.11 per kWh if say it's 30W and I leave it on 24x7 for a month it's 22.32 kWh, or about $2.5 of electricity a month. Multiply by three for like $7.5 a month if this was a California electric rate. In the longer run I'd like to have a way to turn it on and off automatically not so much to save money, but to have a way to turn off all the house lights in one toggle in home assistant when going to bed, just for the convenience of it.

Well, fair point. The investors are the people buying Apple stock I guess. But this is what they're chosing to promote as a benefit for the trillions being spent on GPUs, servers, data centers, power, water, and all the rest of it? Turning off the lights when you leave the room?

The number of ads I have gotten lately about buying ads on Apple Maps has me glad I'm not using Apple Maps. It turns out they're just late to the ad game, not opposed to it.

what are you using for a Maps app if not Apple? Google is (probably) much worse and does pretty much all the same things. Even in nav mode it shows a bunch of sponsored pins like chain restaurants or stores.

Privacy was simply a marketing scheme, not an actual conviction.

not the same as collecting your data, especially with ads.

"They found the analytics control and other privacy settings had no obvious effect on Apple’s data collection—the tracking remained the same whether iPhone Analytics was switched on or off." (https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...)

So the conclusion would be that if the software can be modified, it has a writable storage media attached (not necessarily local) and an image sensor and/or mic, it is, was or will be a recording device at some point in time.

It is reproducible. It has to be for their feature to work. They're trying to find some way to communicate to people that the recording is to a ring buffer, and isn't durably saving everything it hears indefinitely. It's an unenviable position to have to find a way to sell your engineering that enables a fairly privacy-preserving implementation of a feature that intuitively feels like it depends on surveillance to a mass audience. Made especially difficult by the environment where most products really are surveilling you even when they don't need to.

Of course, Apple still collects more data than it needs to and abuses users in other ways, so I don't really feel bad for them.

Sure. It's the transcript that is stored, isn't it?

could what it produces be used by someone else (lawfully or not) to invade my personal privacy?

that’s really the question to be answered here.