In reality, these devices are so complex, we really have no clue what they're already doing, and we've only found out about some of the more recent absurd things they're doing due to flaws with their implementations, such as MacBooks calling out to Apple before you can login after wake causing abnormally long wake times when network conditions are less than ideal or you're connected over international VPN, or calling out to their servers every time you launch an app.

They could have not told us this at all, and we wouldn't have found out until some hacker playing around with network interfaces noticed unusual traffic going to Apple's iCloud servers from the bird daemon.

What Apple is doing is distasteful to me, but I'm afraid the market is so poor in comparison, I don't know what else you could purchase besides Dell XPS systems running Ubuntu.

But there's no phone version of that, to my knowledge.