There are no "backdoors into Google and Apple." The government has to request specific accounts' data with a court order.

The NSA isn't "vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the main nodes." It does full take in some countries with national security interest and collects data to or from some endpoints outside the US known to belong to foreigners with a court order.

We know all of this from the documents Snowden leaked and the documents the government declassified.