"Camera, Cortana/CoPilot, and Photos can now be uninstalled". Mac and iOS come with PhotoBooth/Camera, Siri and Photos preinstalled, I don't think can be removed.
"No Bing, no Edge, no upselling." You can't remove Safari, comes with upselling to Apple drive.
Apple also comes preinstalled with Maps, Music, BookReader, NewsClient, MailClient, TV app, Notes app. For all I have better alternatives so tonnes of bloat and at worse many of them can't be completely disabled. They keep popping at some unexpected places.
For that matter popular linux distros come with similar apps, though through some maze in installer you may have been able to skip them.
We’re talking passed each other, because the parent is complaining that “random third party ads” are in the task bar, nothing to do with Microsoft and not relevant to the context they’re in.
Apple News could be criticized for having a default list of news sources and I think that’s fair. But the news app is first party. Apple Music could be criticized for its upselling, and that’s justified as heck, but it’s still first party.
However; Safari and edge aren’t comparable. Safari seems to be perfectly content in being relegated to storage, never to hit memory or the CPU again, and I believe it is possible to remove it. Edge begs for its life when you even consider installing an alternative browser.
That’s not the topic being discussed in this branch of the thread as far as I understood it, but even if you were to take that point it’s a very large difference.
It absolutely is the same thing Microsoft does, just with different branding. In fact, Apple was doing it before MS. If anything, MS is just copying Apple there.
The only difference is that they have been doing it for 15+ years and during this time they convinced you that it is okay that they do it on a pocket computer, as if it was somehow magically different.
Then we don't understand the phrase "the same thing" the same way.
An Apple box comes with Apple software and services. It does not come with third party apps preinstalled and it does not show me ads. The one exception that I can think of is in the App Store and in their TV offer, but this is not what you are talking about.
I disagree with a thousand things that Apple does but this comparison is disingenuous.
I dislike that they do this and Apple can be criticised for a million different things. 1) this is not it; 2) this is not what Microsoft is doing.
It has filled the Dock with (all) Apple apps the last 15+ years.
I don't quite understand why you're comparing a desktop OS to the phone OS, but I guess that can make some sense?