All of these services are severely limited, crippled and provide worse experience if you don't buy Apple hardware.

How is iCloud, music, tv, and maps crippled? I haven’t used it on non macOS or iOS machines so I am curious.

As someone who has used tv on non-Apple devices I can say it works completely fine. It doesn't stream 4k like it would on apple devices, but it works fine.

- As for iCloud, their Windows client is a little lackluster. For example, the only way they can sync your iCloud calendar on Windows is by creating an Outlook plugin. So the only place I can view my iCloud calendar on my Windows computer is on the Outlook app.

- As for Music, the web player is completely fine. Not any less optimized than the Apple device versions. Would actually go further and say it looks MORE optimized than the mess of iTunes/"Music" on the Mac. Apple's native music app on the Mac has never been good.

- As for Maps, I don't think I've ever seen a web based version of it. Haven't seen a windows app variant either.

Edit: made it easier to read

It might just be me, but Apple TV on the web is extremely slow and buggy.

Also, Windows lets you login into your iCloud account without the iCloud client, so you can still have your iCloud calendar (and emails) in the stock apps. I don't use the iCloud client because I don't use it to store files, but I still have my calendars and emails synced on my Windows desktop.

As for Maps, they don't really have a consumer facing web client, but they do let other websites embed Apple Maps. DuckDuckGo, for instance, uses Apple Maps for their maps.

> As someone who has used tv on non-Apple devices I can say it works completely fine. It doesn't stream 4k like it would on apple devices, but it works fine.

You can certainly buy televisions that have built in support for 4K, HDR, and Apple TV.

>As for iCloud, their Windows client is a little lackluster. For example, the only way they can sync your iCloud calendar on Windows is by creating an Outlook plugin. So the only place I can view my iCloud calendar on my Windows computer is on the Outlook app.

You can access your calendar and all the rest of iCloud directly through any web browser. Including productivity apps like Pages.

>As for Maps, I don't think I've ever seen a web based version of it.

DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps instead of Google Maps now.

iClouds calendar and contacts used to just be CardDAV and CalDAV. Has that changed?

It still uses CalDAV (not sure about CardDAV), it is just difficult to get the URLs as it involves watching network requests on the iCloud webapp.

How would a search engine be "severely limited, crippled, and provide a worse experience" when used from a web browser?

what if search engine will require you to sign-in with apple ID

Apple pretty famously goes out of it's way to not collect that sort of privacy busting user data in the first place.

For instance, when Apple Maps uses user devices to update it's map data like Waze does:

>“We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B.

Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...

> Apple pretty famously goes out of it's way to not collect that sort of privacy busting user data in the first place.

It also enables Apple Ad tracking by default on iOS / iPadOS so please don't mix Apples' marketing with actual state of things in the world :/

What do you imagine that does?

Why is that a problem? You're not being forced to use it, I'm sure it will integrate beautifully into their systems, which is what Apple products are meant to do. If you don't like the ecosystem, don't use it.

Edit: Also, this is a lot of jumping to conclusions, Google can be used on any device, if Apple wants to compete, it will be usable on any device.