[dangus]

I’ll admit it’s not the best, but “huge dealbreaker” seems dramatic.

1. It’s not even a requirement for business/enteprise customers.

2. It remains trivial for technical users to bypass.

3. Literal billions of iPhone and Android users live with a similar soft restriction. Like, yeah, you can skip making an account on those devices, but they’re damn near useless in practice without them.

[olyjohn]

Okay, I'm glad you're used to it, but why are you defending it?

[zem]

people have unfortunately accepted that as part of using a phone, but trying to impose it on desktops is a very large change imo. it's part of the general trend of users not truly owning their devices.

[dangus]

Not really? I imagine most Mac users also have their Apple ID logged in for things like iCloud and the Mac App Store, even if they have a lot of manually installed apps.

It’s not really that crazy.

I totally agree that Microsoft shouldn’t explicitly force an account on you as iOS, Android, and macOS don’t do that, but at the same time it’s just not such a crazy idea.