As someone who is accustomed to free software operating systems, macOS is much closer to Windows than it is to what I'm used to.
Just the other day, my M1 Mac at work slowed to such a crawl that mouse movement badly lagged due to runaway 'triald' (ML learning on user inputs) and Siri processes. They relaunched every time I killed them, and they were running even though Siri was explicitly disabled. Turns out there's no way to actually disable Siri without disabling SIP, which I cannot do on my work computer.
So on macOS I'm still plagued with cloud-connected crap I cannot control (or sometimes even expect) that at worst can make my computer completely unusable.
Is it different from Windows bullshit in interesting ways worth talking about? Definitely. Can the two things be compared? Definitely!
It's about comparability of the two operating systems with respect to similarity to 'adware' which is characterized by
- nagging
- online accounts
- tracking user behavior
- 'free' cloud services (the user is the product, blah blah blah)
- having an adversarial relationship with your own tools; having to go to extraordinary lengths to disable user-hostile behavior
which are all very much implicated in products like Siri and in being unable to actually disable it.
When you think seriously about what adware is like and what actually makes it so odious, it's clear that parts of macOS are characterized by many of the same traits and behaviors, even though Apple isn't selling third-party ads in macOS the way Microsoft is doing with Windows.
Just the other day, my M1 Mac at work slowed to such a crawl that mouse movement badly lagged due to runaway 'triald' (ML learning on user inputs) and Siri processes. They relaunched every time I killed them, and they were running even though Siri was explicitly disabled. Turns out there's no way to actually disable Siri without disabling SIP, which I cannot do on my work computer.
So on macOS I'm still plagued with cloud-connected crap I cannot control (or sometimes even expect) that at worst can make my computer completely unusable.
Is it different from Windows bullshit in interesting ways worth talking about? Definitely. Can the two things be compared? Definitely!