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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Apple preloads the phone with commercial apps that I didn't ask for like Apple Music, and those apps will get automatically triggered for some content. They show news and other unsolicited content practically in the home screen (the widget screen is just a swipe away, every user will stumble there). What's the difference?

I think people are a bit blind to Apple's defaults. They compare a fresh Windows 11 install to their own customized iOS install with a decade of history, and conclude that Microsoft is so much worse. But the out of the box experience for a new user isn't all that different, IMHO. (MacOS is still better than Windows in many respects, but it's been steadily moving closer to iOS and comes with an ever-growing pile of Apple default apps loaded in the Dock and set as defaults.)

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Yes, it does come with Apple Music (and whatever Apple News it - perhaps I've missed it?) And they do nag about using Apple Music a lot.

I dislike that they do this and Apple can be criticised for a million different things. 1) this is not it; 2) this is not what Microsoft is doing.

It has filled the Dock with (all) Apple apps the last 15+ years.

I don't quite understand why you're comparing a desktop OS to the phone OS, but I guess that can make some sense?

Let's compare apps from the article.

"Camera, Cortana/CoPilot, and Photos can now be uninstalled". Mac and iOS come with PhotoBooth/Camera, Siri and Photos preinstalled, I don't think can be removed.

"No Bing, no Edge, no upselling." You can't remove Safari, comes with upselling to Apple drive.

Apple also comes preinstalled with Maps, Music, BookReader, NewsClient, MailClient, TV app, Notes app. For all I have better alternatives so tonnes of bloat and at worse many of them can't be completely disabled. They keep popping at some unexpected places.

For that matter popular linux distros come with similar apps, though through some maze in installer you may have been able to skip them.

We’re talking passed each other, because the parent is complaining that “random third party ads” are in the task bar, nothing to do with Microsoft and not relevant to the context they’re in.

Apple News could be criticized for having a default list of news sources and I think that’s fair. But the news app is first party. Apple Music could be criticized for its upselling, and that’s justified as heck, but it’s still first party.

However; Safari and edge aren’t comparable. Safari seems to be perfectly content in being relegated to storage, never to hit memory or the CPU again, and I believe it is possible to remove it. Edge begs for its life when you even consider installing an alternative browser.

That’s not the topic being discussed in this branch of the thread as far as I understood it, but even if you were to take that point it’s a very large difference.

It absolutely is the same thing Microsoft does, just with different branding. In fact, Apple was doing it before MS. If anything, MS is just copying Apple there.

The only difference is that they have been doing it for 15+ years and during this time they convinced you that it is okay that they do it on a pocket computer, as if it was somehow magically different.

Then we don't understand the phrase "the same thing" the same way.

An Apple box comes with Apple software and services. It does not come with third party apps preinstalled and it does not show me ads. The one exception that I can think of is in the App Store and in their TV offer, but this is not what you are talking about.

I disagree with a thousand things that Apple does but this comparison is disingenuous.

> I think people are a bit blind to Apple's defaults.

I think there is some truth to this. But the reason people are blind to it is that, even if Apple and Microsoft are doing the same thing philosophically to a degree, Apple’s implementation of it feels less aggressive, less cheap, and more easily turned off than MS’s approach (two taps to permanently remove the news widget).

For what it’s worth, Apple News, even the free version, is actually a half decent news app if you’re in a supported area for local news.

> comes with an ever-growing pile of Apple default apps loaded in the Dock and set as defaults

Realistically, this is the direction consumer workstations are heading, and it’s the right direction. The average user is nontechnical, and less interested in customization than functionality. They want apps preloaded and preset as defaults. For those who don’t, there’s always Linux. But I think it would be a misrepresentation to suggest this is somehow a bad thing or that the masses don’t want or wouldn’t benefit from this.

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