(my original comment was some rhetorical question, I edited it to be more direct and less passive-agressive)
They had some promising years but I always sensed a struggle in the wheelhouse.
Now they are back to forcing Edge on people, ads on login screen and in the Start menu are their new inventions and their store is almost as broken as ever and most importantly hard earned trust flew out the window in the process.
Who is the bigger threat here? The real threat to user freedom is the tribalism of picking the "lesser evil" when there are workable non-evil solutions like linux.
I'm not Apples greatest fan (see my latest comment), but there is a major difference between iCloud or OneDrive being pre-installed, both which is OK with me, and Candy Crush showing up in the start menu on my work laptop or some stupid game altering my login screen, again on my work laptop.
And yes, I too am a Linux user.
Why choose between various dumb and evil options if nice is available? (I know, some people get as mad at font problems and alignment on Linux as I get on microlagging on Windows and boneheaded CMD-TAB on Mac, but each to their own.)
In my view, the only desktop-grade OS I prefer over the modern Mac is MacOS 9. It was much easier to use and understand from top to bottom. On the other hand, it lacked a lot of features I've come to take for granted (pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, protected memory, support for modern hardware, gestures, etc).
I do really miss the spatial Finder though.
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
"iOS sends the MAC addresses of nearby devices, e.g. other handsets and the home gateway, to Apple together with their GPS location. Users have no opt out from this and currently there are few, if any, realistic options for preventing this data sharing."
Power corrupts and when one company wields too much of it, shit will hit the fan.
I built my computer in 2017, and it's still very capable of running modern games, and in three years it will still be perfectly fine. But I won't be able to run Windows 11 unless I do weird hacks and workarounds, or try to source a TPM that works with my motherboard.
