You still love apple products? This sounds like Stockholm syndrome, I seriously mean that. You are paying your captors.
And after all, the 99% case is that things work well. Choosing products which are worse 99% of the time but where the company is more pleasant to work with in the 1% case where something goes wrong is a tough sell. (Omitted from this discussion is whether Apple products are truly better when they work or not. That's a wholly unproductive discussion which comes down to opinion and mattcantstop clearly thinks that they are.)
Many Apple "engineering" decisions favor the walled garden over robustness; for example, I am unable to update many important applications on my old work Macintosh because they were installed from the app store using an "Apple account", or whatever it's called, that cannot be used anymore because the colleague who knew the password has left the company; having a privileged account on the computer isn't good enough.
This is universally a bad design. It's not just Apple. I know, for example, Microsoft closed a loophole with Microsoft accounts being allowed to be opened using a company email address when your organisation has a hosted domain. This is stupid. Every year I now need to purchase my MSDN subscription using a personal email address based account because my corporate account is not allowed to buy anything from the Microsoft Store. To add insult to injury - unless I am very, very careful and make sure the personal account is completely logged out, I then can't apply the activation code correctly to my corporate account that is associated with the subscription renewal. Before this renewal, which was successful, I have had two years in a row where I have ended up needing to file a support ticket and wait for the "magic" activation flag to be re-set because my browser was half logged in. This year I just logged in to my personal account with Edge and use Chrome for my corporate one to register the activation for the renewal. It shouldn't be this hard!!!
Also - yes, this should probably all be done by IT for me in the background, but we are a small company and that is just the way it is. The subscription was set up years ago and I inherited it from another developer when they left about 3 years ago.
It wasn't even obvious that the personal account existed in the first place; if the app store "just works" and the former designated Macintosh user doesn't care about software updates too much, forgetting that the account was necessary and it should have been either handed over to posterity or purged by uninstalling the involved apps is a reasonable outcome.
I agree, but there are at least a few clear reasons I can imagine why Apple don’t want this:
1. They don’t want people to resell software that they bought.
2. If you could transfer licenses, a group of many people could share a single license between them, transferring it back and forth. Instead of all of them buying one license each.
3. If licenses could be transferred there would for sure be cases of scammers tricking people to transfer their licenses for paid software to them.
Aren't people legally allowed to do this, regardless of what Apple wants?
For example, I owned a piece of hardware called Akai MPC X. It came with a companion software for the computer, a DAW called “MPC2 Software”.
When I sold the hardware Akai MPC X to someone else, I wanted to transfer the companion software for the computer to them. Akai demanded a ridiculous €100 fee to transfer the license for the software from my user to their user. I had other software on my user as well, so me handing over the user as whole was not an option and therefore only Akai could have helped us transfer the license.
In the end the buyer of the hardware therefore got only the hardware and not the companion software for computer.
That experience soured my opinion of Akai by a lot.
The MPC X is still nice hardware and I kind of want to buy an MPC X again in the future. But it sucks that Akai is like this with the software license.
Microsoft makes the tools you want available, you're just not using it and acting like it's Microsoft's fault.
I don't get mad at the knife maker when I cut myself cooking.
Chrome for my work Google/Microsoft accounts and Edge for my personal.
These bad practices are just second nature now, and I dread when the time comes where it becomes another aggravating problem again.
Maybe that account with a personal name and company domain as an address is a company thing and maybe it's a personal thing. In the case of the former, that's bad company IT practices. In the case of the latter, it's bad personal IT practices. In any case, I'm not sure I want a vendor to just hand over access because there's a company domain in the email.
Maybe there are circumstances where it makes sense to do so, but it's not clear that as a general rule, setting up an account with a company email should magically hand over all the data and other information associated with that account to the IT department. Maybe you should assume it does though.
Every example of bad behavior by Apple in relation to their products, customer service etc. connects in the mind with this underlying philosophical difference between how computers should be used, and so the indignant feeling wells up in their brain that Apple users are misled and abused, and if you are misled and abused you must have Stockholm syndrome.
This however is just my reading of the phenomenon I have observed quite a lot.
Before anyone tells me I'm an Apple lover, I would say until the M1 I considered all OS'es equivalent with some various benefits to each, but as long as I have M series Macs I do believe they are very superior (but haven't tried recent - this year - non M machine)
Treating customers like renters after they buy your products at a premium is a pretty onerous practice and it's pretty surreal to see the pushback characterized as megalomania.
Sure, Android has improved lots, mostly because of comparisons with iOS, but who can forget that it used to be the case that you literally couldn't install and run certain apps without agreeing to ALL of the apps' demands? What if someone doesn't want to give Facebook access to your microphone and location?
The fact that you can't uninstall Edge or even have links reliably open in your browser of choice just shows how Microsoft thinks of you, and it's only getting worse, with the extra steps you have to take to even just have a local account. They'll phase that out eventually.
Sorry, but most people, myself included, want and are happy to use a "walled garden" device, particularly if it means I don't have to deal with spyware and apps trying to steal all the data they can.
Your example about Edge shows that Windows is also a walled garden. They just haven't finished all the wall building quite yet.
Apple is, at least often, better than those. It's just that none of them are good enough.
Oh, I don't think that Windows and Android are the only alternatives. Android is pretty much the only smartphone alternative, though.
My primary machines run NetBSD :)
This importance of context in English is the reason why "Buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo Buffalo" and similar expressions are valid sentences.
One should try to be precise in usage, but it's also reasonable to assume interpretation follows normal usage all of which is preamble to pointing out that:
Hey, given the context it should be obvious that "because they want to control everything" actually means "because they want to control everything on their computer" which is a commonly expressed desire by a large portion of this community and thus the expression is not an accusation of megalomania.
At some point they control everything and at that point, it's too late to create an alternative product as it would be like 20 generations behind in performance.
You don't have to go so far back as to build your own NAND gates or a computer out of falling marbles, but giving the user almost zero ability to customize is just crazy.
The problem with all the other options I’ve seen is that they are worse.
If windows or linux does not work, there is easy 50 step manual fix on arch wiki, toutube, tomsguide (you have to try all to find the right one)
Do you know how nice is to be able to tell others, that there is nothing you can do, and mean it?
But I get it. As opposed to trying to let it sink in that something that could have easily been fixed and diagnosed you get to hear “buy a new one; nothing can do”, I am sure being able to fix something is less appealing. Because we must not lose sight of things like the organismic satisfaction one experiences when being able to pay for something Apple. That opportunity! Oh, my breathing is going up already. Just the thought of it.
Yeah, I get what you mean.
But if they have sony, apple or any of those - endless vacation!
I guess we may find again the old old yahoo! is useful
Similarly, if you’d like to understand why people put up with Apple’s moderate abuse, maybe ask not how one might write them off as insane, but instead what their alternatives are.
The pain needs to be way greater than the cost of what they have invested. In a way they are not captors of peoples freedom but bankers who hold people's time, effort and money. Even with OP's case I can almost guarantee that whilst he might consider moving away from Apple because of his bricked laptop, he won't - he will side with his investments. Leaving this ecosystem would also cause psychological pain - its very hard to tell oneself that "I was wrong".
The genius is that Apple makes good stuff and they know that what they make "just works" and it all works great together and people will invest not only money but their very selves in the company. The company is the world biggest tech company for a reason.