My conspiration theory about Liquid Ass is their hardware for past 5 years was so good that they needed to make people finally upgrade it. My Air M1 16GB worked absolutely fine until it slowed down immensely on macOS 26.

Which is a very good thing.

iCloud is much more secure than most people realize because most people don’t take the 30 minutes to learn how it is architected.

You can (and should) watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U&t=1993s for all the details about how iCloud is protected, but especially the time-linked section. :)

But iCloud Keychain is end-to-end encrypted using device-specific keys, so Apple cannot read items in your iCloud Keychain (modulo adding their own key as a device key, rolling out a backdoor, etc. but that applies to all proprietary software).