Given Apple's stance on "privacy" I do not think this is fully true. If DuckDuckGo or another privacy focused vendor offered more cash than Google does, Apple would take it.

>> "Apple cares about experience just as much as money."

On the other hand, it's the perfect opportunity to put the 16 ML cores in my phone to work. Local Siri uses a generic model today, but I would use an Apple search engine if it could deliver genuinely personalized results instead of the SEO wasteland Google offers.