You seem to be under the impression that you can create one of those "free accounts" without apple tracking those activities. Privacy is not having anybody be able to log your activity, not "everybody but one company I like".

Apple's walled garden approach to everything makes apple one of the worst offenders with regards to not just privacy, but freedom as well.

That's a great area to discuss but not relevant to what we were talking about. The point I was referring to was the specific claim that you needed to give Apple a credit card to use OS X.

I'm not looking for free as in beer, I am looking to not share data that conveniently uniquely identifies the private me to random foreign 3rd parties like Apple just to do my job. Buying media via cash+reimburse or through company ordering is not my money and is often the solution for using commercial OSes with personal privacy outside my employer remaining similar to the unbanked. (But I can't tell if that is a waste of time with Apple, since I obviously need follow whatever procedures for security updates until the next purchasable media.)

From other comments, it sounds like I can dance around to make it possible on OsX, but every other OS (except ebooks?) that I have ever installed either makes opt out a transparent (though smaller button/font) process or has no registration process at all.

I don't like that the machine will be in a very small group of opt-out OsX systems compared to reasonable percentages of other Oses. By not sharing my personal details, I might be risking my coworkers having lower than normal privacy when using OsX machines.