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Comment by sturza | Hacker News Reader

You can set it up without an Apple ID.

i doubt it.

i recently walked a friend through setting up a their MacBook Air M1. and, like you said, i told them to skip setting an Apple ID. that it was not necessary.

but the first setup doesn't allow you to skip. or didn't make it obvious how to do so. (dark pattern?)

i suppose one could use keyboard shortcuts, or install in safe mode, etc... but for the regular users won't be able to skip that step.

> but the first setup doesn't allow you to skip. or didn't make it obvious how to do so. (dark pattern?)

It does allow you to skip, and it is obvious.

There’s a screen asking you to log in to your Apple ID. There’s a button that says “Set up later”. When you click it, it asks you if you are sure. You confirm. That’s all.

Here are the screenshots:

https://i.imgur.com/2s3sA2L.png

https://i.imgur.com/wU0GU5l.png

You can definitely still do it but like windows now the button is like off to the bottom left somewhere and hard to find.

I did set up my M1 Max without an apple id. I logged into the app store later, but I didn't log into the system itself and double checked that all cloud services were disabled.

I've set up two new M1 machines in my household in the last two months without Apple ID. Everything is fine. No dark patterns. No unskippable prompts.

It does allow you to skip, but you're right that it's a dark pattern. Apple really wants you to be on board with their network services, because Apple 3.0 wants recurring services revenue like a crackhead wants crack.

> Apple 3.0 wants recurring services revenue like a crackhead wants crack

While this is true (to my increasing chagrin), having an Apple ID in and of itself doesn't cost you anything. It does create an account that you can then tie charges to.

I don't, however, recall this quite rising to the level of what I'd call a "dark pattern"; IIRC when I set up my M1 MacBook Air not that long ago, the "Enter your Apple ID" had a "Skip this step" link that was pretty easy to find.

On Macbook the "Set Up Later" is lower left of the dialog box, so it does require swiveling your eyeballs in their sockets until your attention lands 2 inches from center. Kind of an off-white pattern, maybe?

It’s not a dark pattern at all. The step that appears immediately before this one is the one where you can choose to set up accessibility features. The skip option is in the bottom left on that step as well. The skip option on that screen is the option most people will choose, so a) everybody will already be primed to know there’s a skip option in the bottom left by the time they reach the Apple ID step, and b) it seems clear that this is just the design language for the setup wizard and not Apple attempting to hide the skip option. Unless you think Apple wants to intentionally trick people into setting up accessibility features as well?

It's a wizard pattern UI. Forward is on the bottom right.

I kind of love that description. "We don't want a dark pattern, but maybe it could be, you know, beige?"

> While this is true (to my increasing chagrin), having an Apple ID in and of itself doesn't cost you anything.

Privacy.

You can't get an Apple ID without an email and a phone number.

When you enter it during the machine setup, it ties that identity to that hardware serial, which maintains a persistent TLS hardware-serial-linked connection to Apple at all times, letting them know in what cities and at what times that phone number's owner is using their computer.

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