The difference is that you can actually not set these things up: with Windows you often have to choice. Macs allow you to not have an iCloud account and run just fine without them, whereas to avoid a Microsoft cloud account there are magic CLI incantations that have to be invoked. And once you say "no", Apple generally leaves you alone.
I don't mind a bit of 'upsell' or informing (new) users of available offerings, as long as I get a choice.
Until you need to install an app through the App store. Even a free app will refuse to install without an iCloud account. Frustrating when you want something with a verified source, for me it was Wireguard, and don't want to build it locally.
If they can apt get on Ubuntu, they can likely brew install on macOS.
Do you have an example of needing to go through the app store? There's apple's apps, I guess.
WG has MSI/EXE installers for Windows:
* https://download.wireguard.com/windows-client/
Not sure why they can't pave PKG/DMG files for macOS. As an open source example, MacPorts uses PKG:
* https://www.macports.org/install.php
On my work laptop I don't think I've installed anything from the Mac AppStore (Xcode is available from AppStore and (last I checked) as a downloadable XIP too.)
Sounds like the issue is you.
Oh, c'mon. The entire services division exists to sell you things like this. And they are very good at it - 25% of Apple's total revenue
Frankly even if you know what you are doing apple doesn't make this easy. Image Capture is afaik the only real way to transfer photos to an external drive on iphone. And that app has not really seen any love since release, its buggy and frequently crashes with large transfers in my experience. It does weird things like if you select 13 photos to delete, it will delete them but not remove selection having the next 13 photo block pre selected for reasons that are unclear (Maybe the devs know how terrible the transfer experience is so they make it easy for you to throttle the job to like 250 photo chunks with this ui quirk). And what is worse, those icloud previews technically don't exist in the eyes of Image Capture, so those won't be transferred over let alone show up in the image previews.
It is not "entrapping", it's providing a service.
My senior-aged mom does have the skill, nor the desire, to figure out local image storage/backup, and I have no interest in running self-hosted solution (even for myself). Apple providing iCloud for backups is not "entrapping" her.
The complaint here is about the tier pricing model, not the service
If you use more storage why shouldn't you pay more? A 1000 sq. ft. (100 sq.m.) apartment costs more than 500. Is there a cloud storage provider that does not charge per usage? E.g.,
* https://www.dropbox.com/plans
There are certainly service for more technically minded folks that calculate more granularly:
* https://www.rsync.net/pricing.html
But a 'normie' may not appreciate a 'dynamic pricing' model, and may understand a fixed price system better.
I don't know how I would even begin to fill the 50GB plan since I don't trust any cloud storage provider with pictures and videos.
Of course this doesn't extend to obvious things like "running the kernel" and "initializing the filesystem." But in general I want to be the person responsible for running things, not some product manager 3,000 miles away in Silicon Valley.
The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the personal computer user.
Instead it's like we're sharecropping on a device companies have established as a colonial outpost to monitor us for profitable compliance.
There's clearly an agenda to double down on stripping away all remaining privacy. The internet as we knew it and remembered as free is just the medium to make that happen, if not purely a byproduct of this.
Should your computer automatically build search indexes for your files? For most people, fast search is more useful than the disk space this takes up, but it would be doing something you didn't explicitly invoke.
Should your computer turn on global spell check (and even basic auto correct) for text fields? Again, you didn't invoke it explicitly, but most people probably think it's a good idea.
So you might say "well anything that just runs locally is ok" but even that's thorny. Obviously much of the AI stuff apple has been implementing is running locally and some of it has been around for a while (image classification in Photos for example). But not everyone wants the AI, even with local models.
And then there's things like "should your computer default to using NTP time?", again most people would probably say yes, especially given how important accurate time is for modern computer security. But it requires your computer doing network requests to make it work.
"Should your computer automatically check for updates?", again for most people the answer is probably "yes it should". But again it requires your computer to do network requests to make it all work.
"Should your computer automatically scan for malware?", probably yes it should, but keeping those malware lists up to date is going to require network requests and access.
There's always a tension between "being helpful and useful out of the box" and "doing stuff the OS vendor wants".
Anyone who wants an OS that does nothing out of the box is always free to grab any x86 box and install ArchLinux on it, but most people don't do that for the same reason that Spacemacs / Doom Emacs is more popular than a raw emacs install, and things like Sublime, or Notepad++ are more popular than those. Defaults matter a lot.