Giving the Apple engineer (but not Apple) the benefit of the doubt I guess their policy is not to make any promises or announcements in that channel. They have probably said as much as they are allowed.

Forward looking statements can come from anyone and become sticky when considering security laws. Imagine everyone at Apple was sharing their full triage and timeline for every issue; one can then make informed decisions about their stock price, and investors could sue if those statements turned out to be misleading. At a certain point, the risk is too great.