Those are the dumbed down options for plain users.

Power users just disable the Telemetry service.

Start > Run > services.msc. Right-click on "Collected User Experiences and Telemetry". Stop the service and change startup-type to Disabled.

Or you can use windows group policy editor. (which every IT department uses)

Start > Run > gpedit.msc Computer Configuration> Administrative Templates> Windows Components> Data collection and Preview Builds

Allow Telemetry > Disabled.

Now, please do educate me on how to disable telemetry on MacOS Big Sur without third party software.

And then next time Windows is updated it re-enables all of that garbage.

That is what gave me the final push to move my PCs to linux. I kept disabling Cortana and telemetry and every update it would be back.

Same story BTW. I held back to Windows 7 for as long as it was feasible, and then switched to Linux. Was painful at first, but freedom has a price.

When disabled via group policy, no it doesn't.

"Windows telemetry can be easily disabled", you said, but what you're talking about is the opposite of easy, isn't it?

What ? I suggest trying for yourself. This is a 3 step UI workflow starting from scratch and can be done in within 15 seconds, assuming you are comfortable with the Windows UI.

Its definitely easy. EDIT: or is this sarcasm ? difficult to tell.

I think Group Policy "Allow Telemetry = Disabled" doesn't do what you think it does. Here's the description given in the group policy editor:

"By configuring this setting in Windows 10, end users will not be able to opt into a higher level of telemetry collection than you have set for your organization." (Plus some clarification of how broadly this applies.)

That doesn't disable telemetry. It just stops individuals enabling more telemetry than you already had enabled.

There's a companion setting, "Configured Connected User Experiences and Telemetry" that if you give it a valid hostname:port, it will send telemetry to that host instead of to Microsoft. Kind of a larf but spin up a basic Node server on some port, use a fake domain via C:\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and point the GP setting to that domain+port and it'll blackhole the network requests (you do need the local server running because if the request fails, it will be sent to Microsoft).

Overall I agree it's silly we even need to do this.

> Now, please do educate me on how to disable telemetry on MacOS Big Sur without third party software.

There's no lower bar that you could set.