Ironically, it's Europe where privacy championing Apple is way less of a player than Google when it comes to smartphones and services, especially compared to the US market.

So I'm not sure if a privacy conscious approach would buy them much in the EU, at least among consumers.

Overall, I would say consumers' privacy-sensitivity in Europe expresses itself largely in the increased usage of Telegram, Tor, Firefox, and Linux compared to the US.

That's partly because Apple's rhetoric is not always matched by the practical realities of its devices and services. Are they better than Google/Android? Sure, by a long way. Are they actually good? Different question.

For example, assume that you do not wish to transfer any data to or from your Apple device via any third party online system, including Apple's own iCloud, at least not unless it is fully end-to-end encrypted and there is no realistic possibility of the external system reading the data. Instead you prefer to keep everything local, for example connecting to another device over your local network or directly using one of the secure wireless mechanisms. This should be an entry-level requirement for any genuinely privacy-focussed system, yet to this day Apple's lock-in effects and the lack of end-to-end encryption for many types of data using iCloud are in direct conflict with achieving that most basic of privacy requirements.

Apple has only just introduced the ability to transfer everything from one iPhone to another directly. You still infamously can't transfer many common data sets onto or off those phones through standard protocols, and Apple's proprietary software seems to have a poor track record, again pushing users towards iCloud.

If the particular app you have in mind doesn't support that feature (most of the ones I use do), that's not Apple's fault.

And the fact that Apple's entire system uses a proprietary storage scheme and doesn't support standard protocols other than for a few specific cases like photos clearly is a decision that Apple has deliberately made.

IME, wirelessly iTunes can be flaky, though better than in the past. My direct personal experience is that if you use a wire, as stated, it's flawless.

Originally iMessage was supposed to be opened up for third parties but that never happened for some reason.

Isn't that mostly explained by the fact that EUR prices have VAT included (typically 20%) and US prices do not?

Even things like the giant Console rewrite and WSL apparently owe just as much to telemetry meriting their resources as the (return) of Azure and DevDiv's "developer-first focus" to Windows (after all these years).

(A fun irony of the "Start Menu debacle" to which you refer was more of a sample size problem than a telemetry problem. With Windows Vista-8 keeping telemetry primarily opt-in, they mostly only had interesting subsets of newbie/casual users that clicked yes during setup and power users with vested telemetry interests. Newbie/casual users tend to launch apps "Search only" or "Desktop only" keeping all their shortcuts on the desktop. Power Users tend to use alternate launchers or become increasingly "Search only" over time, especially if you count Win+R old timers, which Windows did. Microsoft had a good argument that trying to make the telemetry opt-out would avoid such biased sample sets going forward.)

I'm used to this on web and mobile - because arguably their apps are their private property which I'm using, but there's something incredibly uncomfortable about my operating system running an experiment on me. I get that Windows is also Microsoft's property, but it's the lowest level in the stack, which makes my hardware more theirs than mine if they're able to do what they want with it.

I'm not even against telemetry as long as it's transparent.

Maybe I'll go back to Linux soon.

The biggest/wildest example that was A/B tested to date was Sets. Sets was a feature/system where nearly every window in Windows was heterogeneous tab-capable. (Illustrative example: Open a Word document, add a tab for some OneNote notes, add a browser tab for some research. Save it all as a Set to the Windows Timeline as Set, open it all back up at once.) But ultimately Sets never made the cut out of testing (too many compatibility issues, not enough telemetry usage, too confusing a UX sometimes, not enough apps in the wild with Windows Timeline support, etc) and it sounds like the project is now dead.

(Supposedly it was partly dropped too because apparently they were piggy backing on Edge's UWP tab control and with Edge going "Edgmium" that tab control was considered less critical infrastructure to any team and less of an "in-box" control to piggy back off of. Microsoft Terminal got a version of the UWP tab control pushed out into the open source UWP control toolkit, but probably not in time to be reconsidered as an in-box control for Windows.)

(I was sad I never ended up in the group with Sets turned on. I wanted to play with it.)

(ETA: Also, I really hope as Edgmium gets closer to launch it uses a XAML Island to pick back up the UWP tab control where possible. That would be one great way to feel a bit more Edge and a bit less Chrome knock-off.)

They fail to understand that "Be Like Facebook" is not a positive aphorism or outcome.

Office has sent documents in crash dumps up to Microsoft for a long time. None of the hand wavy security guys say much about it, because it isn’t an audit finding.

Hardly, from my perspective, but do you have sources for that claim, or for Apple formerly being the "darling" for that matter?

Much much bigger than Apple by having much much more marketshare of everything except smartphones.

Don't their Enterprise and business editions of windows omit all the telemetry?