That's never going to happen. Apple sells a 'User Experience' not just hardware - having a complete and mostly closed product is an inevitable consequence of the former - and the number of Linux users that would buy a Macbook isn't a large enough part of the market for them to worry about.
With that said I've had a Macbook Pro and it was pretty much a better piece of hardware (at least as far as build quality) than any other notebook I've used.
How can you say this looking at the hardware landscape?
The recent WWDC obviously shows a big shift towards AI and ML applications within the company. Some things are possible on the device, but many neural nets just cannot be served from an iPhone reasonably. Hence, the move towards more data collection. I really wish they give out more information here. Until then, I'm not sure how much they are actually collecting after their realization that they do need the data to do AI well.
You can find all the videos from WWDC 2016 some time after the session is done. I usually check the next day. They have the videos for several previous WWDCs up as well.
If a recommender system for iTunes can predict the likelihood of me appreciating movies that contain violence against women, that information could be subpoenaed when I am falsely accused of having strangled my girlfriend.
I appreciate that Apple is trying to protect our privacy where they can. But if we want them to make predictions about or behavior, we have to be aware of the fact that we are necessarily giving up some privacy.
I understand that the database Apple wants to build does not contain accurate information about individual users. But if that database allows them to make predictions of our behavior, then there is a privacy issue. If the purpose is not prediction, then what is it?
So Apple can (for example) predict that listing to band A means you are likely to like band C, and then send a list of correlations to your device so the predictions can be made there by examining your library locally. A more probable use is analytics for marketing purposes. Another is selling just these correlations and other aggregate statistics to other parties; this is actually how Mint makes money.
And how is that different from my iTunes example?
That's what makes the data useful and that's what makes it a privacy issue at the same time.
How does sending the same list of conditional probabilities for liking pairs of bands to everyone's device and then having the device pick out the ones actually pertinent to your library compromise your privacy?
What I'm saying is that if Apple keeps data on its servers that is sufficient to predict some of my actions or likes with any accuracy greater than 50%, then that is a privacy concern.
But if you're saying that the data in Apple's database does not have any predictive power on its own, then I agree that it is not a privacy concern.
In that case, my device would have to download some of Apple's data and combine it with data that resides only on my device in order to make a prediction locally on my device.
If that's how it works then I have no concerns.
They even limit the number of samples they get from a specific person so they can't filter out the noise for that person and get their individual response.
But, keep in mind that Apple will have records of all your iTunes rentals and purchases at least for billing purposes. However, at least in the US there's a law about keeping that data private (because of Robert Bork).
My impression always has been that Apple does not collect data that can lead you to be personally identified. I never got any impression that "Apple does not collect data".
Do they care about their bottom line? Of course. It's for that very reason they are investing the time now to secure the trust of generations of consumers.