Apple has shown time and time again that they have the human capital and money to tackle massive projects discretely. It's already fairly well known that Apple's NLP experts from Siri have been reallocated to some secret project. They are more than capable of training an LLM but given their track record in other segments they probably want to wait for the technology to become more "polished" and give less hallucinated answers. They are likely also want the LLM to work locally (at least partially) on their devices using the Neural Engine which adds further engineering complexity to their project. They could even be timing the LLM's launch around a hardware release capable of running the model (M3, M4, etc...).
Neither actually. I ordered a fully specced one in February as well. I been successful with purchasing from Ameridroid in the past; an Odroid N2 I had ordered came really quickly. It looks like the manufacturer wants customer data (https://snipboard.io/CE7SIM.jpg) and Ameridroid doesn't want to comply. I decided to keep my order in to support their efforts.
CarPlay replaces functionality built into the car that runs the navigation, dialer, podcasts, and music player. HN likely support CarPlay because the built-in functionality that does this is usually outdated, intuitive, or nonexistent. Most of the frustration around touchscreens involves them replacing AC controls, headlight stock, seat heaters, etc...
I've used DietPi on several SBCs including the Raspberry Pi 2. Anecdotally, I've found the main advantage is a lot of the quality of life features that the distro offers. A file called dietpi.txt can be used to easily provision new SBCs on the first boot. The distro also has a lot of TUI utilities that can be used to connect the device to WiFi, configure settings, and install common software packages for SBCs (Nextcloud, FTP server, etc...). The creators have also adjusted a lot of the defaults such as the default SSH server (Dropbear instead of OpenSSH) and logging policy (RAM-only by default) to better match how the average hobbyist probably uses their SBC.
