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Comment by aquir | Hacker News Reader

The best time to buy a MacBook Air (or Pro) or a Mac mini! Much less BS and you take it out of the box and use it within 5 minutes.

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The videos being taken down here are about how to avoid: Windows requiring a Microsoft account to install, and Windows only being installable on compatable hardware.

AFAIK an apple account isn't strictly required, but a lot of MacOS won't be functional without one.

How is a Macbook better than Windows in these senses?

You can use mac, ipad and iphone without apple account at all. You can use app store without logging to icloud. You can install apps without app store. There is no nagging to use icloud after initial setup. There is no spyware and adware integrated into standard apps or OS itself. Apple does not sell user data.

>You can use app store without logging to icloud.

You can't download anything from the App Store without signing into it. For that, an Apple ID is required.

> There is no spyware and adware integrated into standard apps or OS itself.

Are you sure? Senator Ron Wyden claimed that the US uses the Push Notification system for surveillance, and Apple never denied it: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...

  "In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests."

At the very least, there is a little bit of spyware integrated into the OS.

Exactly, with the caveat I'm buying very cheap pre-M1 Mac to put Linux on it. Works well.

The later Intel Macs with T1/T2 chip also come with a number of caveats on Linux. Don't expect those to work out of the box with standard Linux distros.

it might work well today for m1/m2 but the writting is on the wall for linux in newer macs.

asahi development slowed down and is getting further away as apple releases new malcs yearly.

i don't think this is a good bet for those who want to use linux.

The problem with this is Tahoe.

The better solution is to buy an x86 laptop and install Linux instead. All of these empires are just milking us.

I use all three platforms regrettably.

I would rather be subjected to fingernail torture than deal with the productivity implosion that is using macOS. It isn't meant for users who do more than stare at webpages. And the workaround apps to give it more productivity such as actually useful taskbars are buggy as hell fighting Apple's trash.

Linux or Windows or bust.

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