To Microsoft's defense everyone does it. Everytime there is an OS update on iOS, I know I will have to go through a dozen of modals that nag me for apple services.
No. Neither my Mac nor my Linux pop up ads or promotions out of the blue during normal operation. So your statement that everyone does it is simply false.
Maybe if you already use the things that they are pushing on you, you won't notice anything. But every time I've updated my work laptop Apple have tried to make me opt-in to Siri after restarting with the new update -- they even add the obnoxious Siri button back to the touch bar even though I've removed it several times.
But for example, I set my default browser to Firefox once, and macOS has never nagged me about Safari since then. That's a difference isn't it?
I neither use Safari on the Mac nor any of their cloud offerings. No nagging. No ads. No promotions. The only thing I had to say no to is telemetry and Siri on the last major version upgrade (the dialog was already set to my previous choices).
Fully agree. And it still tells me that my iPhone setup is incomplete because I haven't set up Apple Pay yet.
And what a poor defense that is. It's almost not worth mentioning.
and if you visit google properties in edge, you get asked to install chrome, i think on youtube it calls it a browser "optimized for youtube" or something along those lines. To be clear, I'm not trying to justify microsofts behaviour, I think neither of these things should happen.
Good point, bad framing. We should scrutinize Apple just as much. And they're doing it for much longer. At the same time Apple forbids Apps to push ad notifications (unsuccsesfully), which is even worse.