This is not personally directed at MrJimPhelps. Should anyone be even mentioning Wndows in this thread? This is an Apple thread.

Devil’s Advocate here: If Apple is so good on privacy, how come iTunes fake accounts still drain people’s bank accounts? And how did iCloud get hacked repeatedly? I know, this strays into security, but the two can sometimes overlap. How does all this track with Tim Cook’s claims about Apple and privacy?

Privacy by Design is great, but in practice, it’s much more difficult to maintain. No one is immune to today’s threats whenever anything is stored in the Cloud. Anyone’s Cloud.

GAPT: Sorry, but you are asking for facts about something that can only be guessed at: what might be really happening in China that the Chinese government would most likely not be very keen in having it known, so your argument can be neither proven nor disproven.

What I have noticed, from personal and direct experience with a, by now, newish Mac, is that, leaving aside some limitations of the hardware already discussed in other threads here, because of Apple overemphasis on “looking cool “, is that their hardware and software work together nicely, with remarkably few hassles and pretty much out of the box. Setting up the Mac was, for me, remarkably hassle free compared with any of the Windows versions I have worked with in the last quarter century, finding in the process just enough quirks to get around to keep it interesting, but not for so long as to prevent me from getting things done in a timely way. In other words: a tool I need to do my job, rather than a fireworks castle that I don’t.

To me, that shows integrity in engineering and indicates a corporate respect for the engineers, be them specialists in hardware or software. And, also to me, that is a good thing. If that brings more business to Apple, what is there to object to? Making money honestly by producing useful things that are better than the deeply flawed product of a deeply flawed rival company is not a dastardly ploy: it is what should be the normal behavior of people that are serious about what they do.

Now, Apple is huge, so the part of it that makes Macs is not necessarily a reflection of the one that makes cellphones, and vice versa. And, as time goes by and the people in charge change as people or are replaced by others with different ideas, who knows what this will end up being like. It could be that, some years down the river of time, Apple’s top managers have become as delusional as others I can think of and that, given where we are now, do not need to be mentioned explicitly.

My personal preference is, in principle, for non-proprietary operating systems such as LINUX, that nobody really owns, so no one can direct its evolution, or involution, through good or poor management. Whether it will evolve to the  point where one can be confident that it will work pretty much out of the box, with only a brief period of tolerable pain and anguish configuring it and figuring out how to deal with its inevitable quirks, is something that remains to be seen.

Does it necessarily matter if the macOS takes the place of Windows or not? Or, put in another way: Do the world PC users ultimately need one operating system to rule them all? How about many compatible ones that compete in a true free-market style and not as it has been until now and that, instead, comply with a common set of minimum standards of quality, stability, intercompatibility and user friendliness?

Yes, Oscar CP, it does make a difference, if we include (may I mention it here?) Linux. Apple and Windows (and Google) are proprietary OSes. Linux is open source. So Linux fits your model of light bulbs much better than the custom-made Apple OSes (iOS, Mac OS). One reason (maybe the biggest) why Apple does not have the update and patching chaos of Windows is that Apple controls everything from OS development to patching to testing to hardware, all within their own walled-garden.

This is the real secret to Apple’s success in maintaining a relatively stable OS and fixing issues when they arise, if you ask me. Apple’s privacy emphasis is only secondary, and a distant second at that. Not a big enough selling point to justify the closed ecosystem or the price premium of Apple products in my view.

The question (for another topic thread) is in my mind:
How is it that one general-purpose OS (Windows) is having so much chaos in their updates and patching, while many Linux distros (also general-purpose and running on a variety or hardware) are relatively stable and relatively trouble-free? (Note I say, relatively.)

If people are interested, I can open up a thread in the Linux Forums about this topic. Edit: This question has been raised in the Linux thread about fast release cycles:
https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/ubuntu-linux-vs-windows-10-fast-releases/#post-227259