Funny how Apple has reached the crapware maturity level that Microsoft users are quite familiar with: After first boot, go through a long list of things to deactivate so that one can experience at least some feeling of agency and privacy when using your own hardware.

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throw0101c 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> After first boot, go through a long list of things to deactivate so that one can experience at least some feeling of agency and privacy when using your own hardware.

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.

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butlike 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The issue with iCloud is that before you even know it, you're paying $9.99/mo. Since 200gb is quite low, the next tier up is 2tb for $9.99, but then you're essentially locked in. I can't view the iCloud price tiers as anything other than predatory.

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officeplant 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But 50GB is $0.99 and I'm only really paying for it since I have a bunch of their private email addresses in use. iPhone backup with just the essentials I trust them with is less than 2GB.

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.

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throwaway27448 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The issue with iCloud is that before you even know it, you're paying $9.99/mo.

Sounds like the issue is you.

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swiftcoder 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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

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throwaway27448 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What's your point? icloud is hardly necessary for anything.

	▲	asdff 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It is designed to entrap people who don't really think about their tech. I know a few people who are in a sort of "late stage icloud" moment with their iPhone. Their phone started filling up with photos and videos years ago. So rather than transfer to some external storage, as they might not even have a working mental concept of a file system let alone a personal computer that isn't work issued anymore for that matter, they started having to buy bigger and bigger storage capacity iphones. Eventually those got full too, so they had to go to icloud and a few have basically maxed out their icloud 2tb plans, because these phones are now producing huge files and recording in 4k I guess even though you are still just looking at it on a 5 inch diagonal screen like in the 5mp phone era. The damn icloud previews can fill up your phones internal storage even with everything technically shoved off to icloud. 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.

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moose333 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Macs allow you to not have an iCloud account and run just fine without them

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.

	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	throwaway27448 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Until you need to install an app through the App store. Do you have an example of needing to go through the app store? There's apple's apps, I guess.
	▲	reaperducer 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's on Wireguard. If they can apt get on Ubuntu, they can likely brew install on macOS.

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ASalazarMX 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd expect turning off Siri as a whole, which is very easy, would be enough. The list is for people who still want to use Siri after it became a OS-level LLM, I mean, Apple Intelligence.

	▲	throwaway27448 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Presumably it's the LLM integrations into apps people want, not an anthropomorphized assistant

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ryandrake 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's the "agency" bit that really annoys me. The Computer is no longer Personal. I expect my personal computer to only do things that I choose to invoke. It should not do a laundry list of things that the device manufacturer wants it to do, nor a laundry list of things the OS vendor wants it to do. I shouldn't have to turn things off. They shouldn't be on to begin with, unless I deliberately turned them on.

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.

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tpmoney 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the fundamental problem is one person's "Only do the things I choose to invoke" is another person's "Why do I have to do all this stupid setup". Especially given that most people aren't computer people, and they want to use their computers to get other tasks done, not to be system administrators themselves.

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.

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arcanemachiner 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The Computer is no longer Personal. I expect my personal computer to only do things that I choose to invoke.

The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the personal computer user.

	▲	wartywhoa23 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's like saying that wind blows because trees sway. 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.
	▲	Terr_ 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, whatever happened to the personal computer, a kind of capital equipment available to the masses, something you own and can direct towards your goals and wellbeing? Instead it's like we're sharecropping on a device companies have established as a colonial outpost to monitor us for profitable compliance.

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throwaway27448 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Comparing apple intelligence to a service that records your screen without consent feels extremely disingenuous.