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by lbwtaylor 1405 days ago
Apple constantly spams you with popup ads for their cloud services, far worse IMHO than any start menu nonsense. To each their own.
4 comments

Where? I have several Macs in my office, I might have seen a question on upgrade, but that's it. In Safari?
Not the commenter but macOS regularly spams people with:

- Ads to try Apple Music free for a month.

- Ads to try News+

- Ads to try Fitness+

- Try Safari (if it’s not your default browser)

- Try/log into iCloud if you’re not logged into iCloud.

- Try the latest macOS release if you aren’t on it.

As an aside, you do not want to even log into the Mac App Store with a personal account on a work computer.

Logging into just the Mac App Store effectively logs you into your iCloud on that machine and sensitive personal data is then strewn across various files under ~/Library. The iCloud sysprefs will claim you are not logged into iCloud but ~/Library will show you the truth.

I am a macOS user and have never seen a popup or ads for News+, fitness+ or Apple Music.

In addition to that, what personal data are you talking about in your last paragraph?

I haven't ever seen a single popup ad for Apple services - what are you referring to?
I see them on iOS any time I go to settings or take a photo or open Apple Music. You might not consider them to be ads, though. “Your iCloud storage is full…” and so on.

Not sure if OSX is like that, though, as I haven’t used it much in the last few years.

And I’ve never seen ads in my windows pro install… so ymmv.
Which popups are these? The only one I ever received was when I hit the limit on my iCloud account. Certainly not anywhere as bad as all the adverts in teh start menu on my Windows work machine.
I’m paying like $4/mo for iCloud storage. All my files are backed up there. I don’t get any ads.

Is there an option like that on Windows?

The point is not that paying $4 a month rent isn’t useful to some people. It’s that another group of people want to own a computer that doesn’t beg for rent at all.

The old macOS provided that the new Mac, not so much.

The old macOS didn’t provide any cloud storage option, and the new one does, for a fee. That seems like progress, not begging for rent or a reason to be nostalgic.
Fair enough but if I decline once why does it need to keep nagging me to upgrade?

Likewise, if I just want to play music, and I decline the free introductory offer of an Apple Music subscription, why does it keep offering?

Like newsletter popups, having something get between me and what I want to do is annoying.

It’s the creeping “Not right now”, “Maybe later”, “We’ll in your face again after a random timer” bullshit I hate.

I agree with you in principle. I just take exception to the claim that this is somehow worse than Windows where you have pervasive 3rd party ads (including telemetry) and no way to opt out.

Frankly, I am rather pessimistic with the industry as a whole. Problems never seem to stay solved. There is constant churn, constant disruption of workflow and UI patterns. Constant change for its own sake and no reflection on what is really important.

I haven't seen an ad in in Windows system so far. Onedrive is MS cloud and backs up your files for free. Mac has full on telemetry where it logs every program you use every time you use it amd may stop you from using it. Apple is building the biggest add network in the world and it needs captive audience for it, Mac will be small fish there but it will be locked inand down just like the iPhone or ipad.
Yeah I think that’s my take on it all too.

Windows is… not for me either.

It seems like after a certain level of complexity product design is a very difficult thing to do.

My guess is that few people have the skill to really get product refinement just right over the long term. So you end up with either stagnation, where people are afraid to improve things or random unnecessary changes that make stuff worse.

Sounds like the days of a lack of ads on Apple products is changing: https://www.macworld.com/article/831218/ads-stocks-news-app-...
OneDrive and it's free. Never seen an ad in Windows system itself. Switch to Windows and Save! :)
I like to save that 48 dollars per year and just use the free tier of google drive.