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.