I am going to defend Apple: their new built in system model in iOS26 and iPadOS26 is very decent, similar to the small Google Gemma models and the small Chinese models. For complex queries a free API call is transparently made to a secure computed environment on Apple’s servers that are documented to preserve privacy.
A problem is that even though it is super simple to write Swift / SwiftOS apps to use the system model, I don’t see much evidence that many developers are using the model in their apps.