Apple is the “least bad” guy at the moment. They are not “good”. But all the big guys are bad to some extent. (And since you brought them up - Apple’s cloud push is bad, though not remotely as bad as Microsoft’s cloud push)
I am not saying Microsoft is exceptionally bad in any way. I am just saying the “new, good Microsoft” is a mirage. They are as bad as they had ever been, except they have been beaten into submission in some sectors, so they behave in those.
Apple is the worst with their initiative to make their devices irrepairable, monopolistic practices on iOS and extracting value out of their target audience ruthlessly.
Apple does not have a monopoly - Android outsells them significantly in just about every market. Microsoft still has a PC monopoly. That makes a huge difference.
And yes, Apple making their device impossible to repair is evil, but their value extraction is opt-in (buy buying into their ecosystem) because they are not a monopoly.
I was referring to the legal concept of monopoly, of which they have non, and Microsoft does (and was in fact, convicted for abusing it, independently in the US and in the EU).
(The kind of monopoly Apple has on the appstore, much like the Sony monopoly on the playstation, and Microsoft on the Xbox, is not AFAIK an antitrust target because non of them command a significant part of a market without alternatives; whereas Windows on a PC was an antitrust target because it does have that hold on a market, AND microsoft abused it to enter other markets).
It is an open secret that Apple is doing all these privacy things for two reasons: PR and for setting themselves up as the only choice for ads for iOS users (which will soon include Mac). How anyone can just look past this (and that they jumped into NSAs arms and shared everything) baffels the mind. Apple is in no way less evil than Facebook or Google.
w.r.t google, it seems like Apple is the lesser evil - as far as I (and anyone I know) can tell, if you turn off location tracking, it actually stays off.
But there is definitely no "good guy" among the big player. Right now, Pine64 and Puri.sm are the only not-yet-proven-evil guys around, and they are both minuscule.
The evidence for MS being bad in the post I replied to is them forcing Edge on you. Well, can I uninstall Safari, or install any other browser on iOS that isn't a reskin of Safari? Not so far as I'm aware. The integration is much tighter than what MS offers.
I am not saying Microsoft is exceptionally bad in any way. I am just saying the “new, good Microsoft” is a mirage. They are as bad as they had ever been, except they have been beaten into submission in some sectors, so they behave in those.