[saturn8601]

When you set up a new mac or install a fresh copy it asks you to sign in/create an account once, you click no and it never asks you again.

It then asks you if you want to enable siri, you press no and you never see it again.

>If I recall correctly you can't install anything from the app store on an Mac/iPhone without an Apple account.

You can download Xcode using their site instead of the App store, but you still have to login to download the file. I guess there isn't anything preventing you from running the installer downloaded from another user's computer. Still as a developer you can install the command line tools through the terminal and then code in non apple languages without the app store.

I'd argue most users install standard applications (since this is a computer and not an idevice) which provides you a clear path to using the computer without ever having to make an account.

That does not answer your question, but i'd push back and say that Apple accounts dont really intrude on the user like Microsoft accounts do. You dont need to use it to login, you don't ever see it other than the app store or the setting menu, you can disable icloud and not even use that. Most importantly though like I mentioned there is still a path to avoiding it completely.

This is night and day difference from Windows where this entire thread is full of all the tricks Microsoft plays and really, people here are justifying registry hacks as if thats normal. Its not.

Mac is slowly probably following Microsoft, not the other way around. If Mac sinks into the nonsense that is Windows I'll have to go back to Linux (and eternally hate my life forever maybe after ~30 years of my life revolving around computing, I will rather give up computing than go back to Linux).