Hacker News Reader

Comment by justsomehnguy | Hacker News Reader

Ten years ago you needed iTunes to enable your iPhone/iPad.

Sure there are probably was a way to skip most of the requirements (except iTunes itself) but around that time I helped a friend to activate an iPad.

I was forced to register an Apple account AND give it a credit card to activate that iPad.

You can blame MS all you want, but MS IS LATE FOR THE PARTY WITH ALL THAT SHIT.

View on HN

I bought my first Apple device (an iPad) two weeks ago out of necessity and even created an Apple account in advance, assuming Apple will force me to use it. I was very surprised to find a very obvious "Skip" button that let me complete the process with no account.

And just because other manufacturers do it, isn't a reason not to blame MS for what MS did. Nobody forced them to do this and it's not even common practice. The OS wasn't "built with online accounts in mind". It's something nobody asked for and everyone lived happily without before.

Are you able to e.g. install apps without an apple account? I seem to recall simple things like that wasn't possible unless you had signed into an apple account.

Not being able to use the app store is pretty different from not being able to setup the computer.

Considering that on these Apple devices the Apple store is literally the only entry point for running actual programs on these devices, I would say it is indeed pretty equivalent to "not being able to setup the computer".

I don't know, almost everyone who has an iPad in my family probably never used an app store. They just use it for browsing, facetime and calendar management - and all these apps are preinstalled. I'm trying to think what I have installed on mine that isn't standard, and it's pretty much.....YouTube? I could browse that through the browser if I wanted to.

Like, my point is that these devices are fully functional out of the box even without an account(but yes, it sucks that you need one to unlock it fully)

Can you no longer install free apps from the App Store on a Mac without creating an account or signing in? I thought that used to work.

This hasn't been a thing for a long time. App store requires an iCloud account.

You might have bad information. Very little of the software I run on my Mac comes from the App store. Even if your assertion were accurate... You'd still be able to use Safari, and web browsing accounts for the lion's share of most people's computing needs. So the score is:

Windows 11: lay-users can do literally nothing of value with their computer without signing in to an account they probably don't want

MacOS: lay-users can use the internet and download software provided outside of the app store without signing into an account that they probably don't want

Calling these equivalent would be quite an exaggeration.

franga2000 was saying they bought an iPad, not a Mac

That is true. I guess I missed that we were comparing the operating systems completely across device categories. However, half of what I said still applies since I explicitly mentioned Safari.

Since iOS doesn't let you sideload apps, it's actually not very different at all.

It has Safari. But I'm curious why we are comparing Windows to iOS instead of it's desktop counterpart.

From a Windows perspective, Apple might seem somehow generous, but if you're not interested in Apple's cloud services or you're actually concerned about privacy, the Mac setup wizard is still a minefield of shit to opt out of. :-\

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com