I don't know what the disconnect is. I'm running Windows 11 Arm right now on the best laptop I've ever owned -- an Asus Zenbook A16 with OLED screen and 48 GB of RAM (all for $1699).

It's super fast -- it beats a 2026 Macbook Pro rendering Blender "Classroom".

I have a Microsoft account, I don't know what the big deal is. I follow the happy path. It's nice to have settings (and I can control which ones) sync across machines. I pay for a Office365 subscription.

I don't see ads popping up anywhere. I did disable about a dozen things (those silly icons in the search bar, syncing desktop icons across machines, etc) all through exposed UI switches, no "hacks" or undocumented registry tweaks.

I've watched coworkers go through all sorts of contortions, and downloading hacked binaries from sketchy sites, just to avoid creating the local account and I'm not sure why. I use my name and info on my longstanding Microsoft account, but you can just as easily call one "mymaxasus_11111", and be done with it.

Do you like coming back to your work and finding that it rebooted on its own schedule and lost your context? That's my biggest frustration. If I only had one computer, it would be fine, but I manage an organization that's too small for enterprise and so I have to deal with the silly ads and gizmos on a dozen computers, managing group policy requires a domain and a lot of expertise I shouldn't need, and I'm not even sure I can turn some of this stuff off using group policy.

By contrast, I got a few Chromebooks and all my employees prefer them. If it weren't for a few legacy things, I'd switch entirely to ChromeOS or ChromiumOS.

1. Personal Computers are personal. Inviting an outside observer into one is no different than inviting one into the bathroom. What I do in there is my business.

2. Friction. This is likely MS's attempt to slow-walk Windows into a subscription service. If nobody resisted, that walk wouldn't be slow.