Maybe now, but definitely not originally. Apple grew the Maps ecosystem originally for feature parity reasons, not privacy ones. That’s at least a bit more similar to the Search situation.

Turn-by-turn was the killer feature back in iPhone 4S time frame, and Google refused to allow it iOS, shipping it only on Android. Apple had some geographic features (reverse geo lookup specifically, iirc) prior to this in-house and had started developing their own maps because of the longstanding tension with iOS and Android, but Apple rushed to get turn-by-turn directions out the door in mid-2012, which is partially what caused it to launch pretty half-baked. Google introduced a dedicated Google Maps app on the iOS App Store in late 2012 with turn-by-turn in response to losing millions of daily-active users to the launch of Apple Maps.

Here’s a retrospective from 2013 by The Guardian on the whole thing with a lot more detail:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/11/apple-maps-google-iphone-users

Now, Apple has run a web crawler since at least 2015:

https://www.engadget.com/2015-05-06-apple-web-crawler.html

Apple has been steadily building up its search expertise for the last decade. Notably, it acquired Topsy back in 2015, which was a search engine mostly based on Twitter data:

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-shuts-down-topsy-the-200-million-mystery-laid-to-rest-2015-12?op=1

… then launched a few web-based Spotlight search integrations a few years later (which I can’t find a good source for) which integrated common web searches for things like weather and news directly into Spotlight.

IMO, based on the above (and maybe a bit more), Apple’s explanation in the article doesn’t tell the full story. It doesn’t want to build it, but it could. This is more is about Apple wanting to keep extracting the money from Google and not having to build another also-ran service to directly compete.

It looks like the png is getting word wrapped. Line spacing is so large that the png on the second line is getting pushed into the space of the icon below, and the icon below is given a higher Z value, so it goes over it. The different font has a different letter width and can influence the line spacing by being taller than the original font.

See if you can find an option to reduce line spacing or an option to increase icon spacing (vertical or horizontal). I would expect these to be advanced settings though. Iirc, most Linux desktops don’t use ellipses on long names, like some other operating systems (macOS iirc).

Oh, I totally agree – didn’t mean to give any impression otherwise. Filling the energy demand gap as quickly as possible with the least impactful generation source should be very high on societal goals, IMO. And it seems like that is what’s happening, mostly. Solar, wind, and storage are the largest share of what’s being brought up this year:

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/chart-nearly-all-new-us-power-plants-built-in-2024-will-be-clean-energy

As I understand it, planning new, grid-scale nuclear power plants takes 10-20 years. While this isn’t a reason not to start that process now, it does mean something needs to fill the demand gap until the nuke plants (and other clean sources) come online to displace the dirty generation, or demand has to be artificially held down, through usage regulation or techniques like rolling blackouts, all of which I would imagine is pretty unpalatable.

Apple locks old devices out of updates

Dropping support for older platforms happens for a number of reasons, including hardware-level security problems and lack of interest for ongoing maintenance. Linux distributions even drop support for older hardware. Even the Linux kernel itself has dropped support. A decision to not keep supporting a piece of hardware is not the same as preventing updates.

The thing to focus on isn’t that Apple halts maintaining its own OSes on older hardware. Rather, we should press hardware makers and regulators on the boot loader locks and other obstacles that prevent end users from installing alternate OSes, especially once hardware makers end OS support for hardware. E.g., older iPads that can’t run modern iPadOS but could easily run a lightweight Linux distribution. This applies to more than just Apple, like some Android devices. “Internet of Things” devices are similarly affected – Belkin halted support for a generation of Wemo smart plugs when a vulnerability came out – they told consumers to buy new Wemos and provided no alternate path for the older, still functional plugs.