
I’m in the office today and staging a few Windows laptops for employee use. It takes me about an hour to set up a Windows laptop these days, mostly because of Microsoft and shovelware bloat…
The image above is what you’re faced with when setting up an HP laptop currently… Whee! And I have to manually delete all of it to ensure the system is clean for testing…
Microsoft on the other hand is really, really interested in your personal information, and getting a machine set up for testing with a local account gets harder with each update.
Most of the time you can shift-f10 into a command prompt at the setup networking screen, type in oobe\bypassnro, and wait for the reboot to get a tiny little “I don’t have Internet” link that will let you set up a local account. But Microsoft is getting rid of that too… The only recourse at that point will be to roll my own OS installers and then go dig around in the manufacturer’s website for drivers.
When I bring this up most people will point out that Apple does the same sort of thing… But not really.
See, Microsoft is a software company and therefore has to do a lot of incremental sales and tap as many small revenue streams as possible… For example, Windows 11 Home costs $139 and Microsoft still injects ads into it and data-mines you as a revenue stream… And some people think the insistence on a “free” Microsoft account is innocent…
With a Microsoft account what you get is another vector for Microsoft to sell software and services to you, and acquire data from you to sell… If Microsoft gives you an email address, it’s purely to sell you Office 365 and tell you about how great Edge is because Edge is another sales / data-mining vector. If Microsoft gives you cloud storage, it’s just to rifle through your data for anything they can resell – when OneDrive feels like working at any rate. And the device settings sharing with a Microsoft account simply tells Microsoft what hardware you have and lets them unify your advertising IDs across platforms…
Apple on the other hand is a hardware company, so their interest is in selling you more hardware for large sums of money. And the Apple Account exists to get people locked into the ecosystem… There isn’t really a need for an incremental advertising / data-mining revenue stream if Apple can just sell people a new $1000 phone every year because all of their photos are in iCloud and their apps are tied to their Apple Account.
And annoying users with ads and data-mining is counter productive to that “sell more hardware” goal – Apple wants you happy with the ecosystem, so injecting a McAfee installer into the start menu at random is just not something Apple will do.