I think this article points to a missing product in the market - integrated cloud services but with the cloud located on a private server in the home. Specifically for a company like Apple (who hand waives at being pro-privacy) to enable all iCloud functionality to be hosted on a personal mac. From a high level (and likely ignoring important but probably not insurmountable technical details), the idea would be for everything to look exactly the same to the iPhone user, but for all data and processing to happen on a machine the user controls. No Apple accessible or hosted user data, end-to-end encrypted in transit, etc.

One might argue there are products that can fill this niche and certainly many on Hacker News are capable of setting up their own home servers. However, that is not nearly as convenient or realistic for the average person to do. Those setups also don't integrate directly into default services like iMessage, Photos (including both storage and things like photo tagging), etc. Modern desktops and many people's internet connections should be powerful/fast enough to handle this.

To the extent user data is used to feed big-data algos/machine learning/etc, this might not be practical. That's why I suggest Apple do it rather than Google (Apple already claiming much of their ML services are handled on-device).

One might argue that's essentially something iTunes handled (still could?) but again it's not nearly as integrated as modern iCloud services. And that only works over a local network or direct wired connection.

The basic idea is just to move data hosting and processing from third-party servers where users have no direct control over how their data is used or accessed to hardware sitting in their home.