Not sure how this will evolve but I will leave this with you

https://www.apple.com/apple-card/

Yes please, this is the only card I actually want mostly for security, privacy, zero fees and expense tracking reasons.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Apple in their online services division, and I know first hand that (at least during that time) they cared a lot about privacy (often against short to medium term financial gains)

This does make me sad. The shift away from hardware and software to "services" and "financial products".

Despite the fact that I want the banks to be disrupted, I'd rather have a Stripe or Square or Coinbase etc do it, and have Apple focus on other things.

Oh God no! Not Square at least. They'll happily send your financial statements to random other people, then act like it's completely normal that they did that, and really weird that you're upset about it. Plus their customer service (for end users who buy products, not the merchants) is extremely adversarial. They have a really shitty chat bot that is the only way to contact them to get help when they screw something up. It's awful and very anti-consumer.

Yeah, I signed up for that the day the beta invite hit my inbox. See above for reasons why. We'll see how it goes.

When you get the device home you'll need (edit: be asked) to sign up for an Apple ID and an iCloud account, I believe? They may not bother you at the point of sale but that's only because they know you'll be giving up your private info soon enough.

You believe incorrectly. If you want to use some other services for email, streaming, etc., you need neither an AppleID nor an iCloud account to use any of your Apple devices. They may ask you to enter or create one, but I haven't seen a case where there isn't a (small hard to see) way to opt-out.

They're still asking you for all that info. Saying no to a checkout clerk is easier and faster than finding the "hard to see" (your words) opt-out, which may only suppress the request for a week or month before popping up again.

Your examples are an inherent part of the value proposition. With an Apple ID and an iCloud account you can do much more with your device than you otherwise could. Customers who buy into the Apple ecosystem need to be assigned an identity within that ecosystem, and most people understand that. If it bothers you, you can always decline, or buy some other phone or computer.

There is no room whatsoever to compare Apple IDs with being force-fed sales pitches for unrelated items while trapped in an aluminum tube at 30,000 feet.

If you wanted to tilt at this particular windmill, Microsoft account IDs would be a better horse to ride. They provide little or no value to most Windows users, but the company does everything it can to drag you into their ecosystem.

You're choosing to understate the value of these "unrelated items." Just yesterday I was upgraded to first-class on an international flight, in part because I once signed up for the "unrelated" credit card on that particular airline. Signing up for a Target card gives you 5% all Target purchases. Both those things do offer real, tangible value, whether you want to believe it or not.

We'll need to agree to disagree on this. IMO, airplane trips will become more or less unbearable if this practice is scaled to its full potential.

To be clear, I have no problem with the airline offering a credit card. Put an ad in the flight magazine, maybe hand out brochures with the ticket folder. But having the F/As treat the whole airplane like a cheap hotel conference room, as breck describes, where people have shuffled in to listen to timeshare sales pitches or Scientology lectures in exchange for some stale donuts? No, that's not OK.

Not saying I enjoy in-flight announcements, I most certainly don't. But you and mikestew are saying it's OK for Apple to bug people to sign up for shit or to request personal info, but not OK for everybody else. The differentiation is what I'm objecting to.

All that stuff makes me think of a puppet on a string. I prefer a life with fewer strings. Frankly I don't really see why customer cross licensing deals between businesses isn't an anti-trust issue.