It's sad and disappointing but not surprising in any way. The immutable truth is we simply can't trust these companies. We need to cut them out of our lives as much as humanly possible.
Linux is flawed but it's ours. I hope we continue to have unlocked computers to run it on forever.
This is certainly true for companies like Google that very famously refuse to provide customer support.
However, companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple provide robust, free customer support.
based on the amount of fake/fraudulent products sold on amazon's marketplace I really can't concur that they have robust customer support that is really empowered to do anything.
Between Apple, Google and Microsoft, only Apple provides free customer support, in person, or over the phone.
Microsoft provides support, but you have to pay for it.
Google is the only one of the big three computing platforms that literally couldn't couldn't care less about your issues.
Its not free, you paid for that as part of your purchase cost.
You just didn't get it.
It makes me sad that we now have to treat a MacOS initial setup as a hostile experience, the same way as setting up Windows 10 for an offline user account and intentionally not creating a microsoft account. The number of steps and dark pattern UI things a Windows 10 Home or Pro user has to jump through in the initial install to create a local-only account is really quite amazing. I just did a fresh install of a win10 home VM recently and ran into this.
Two of the reasons I switched from a FreeBSD desktop environment to MacOS back in the 10.4 days (Tiger?) was because of the switch to the Intel CPUs with the first gen Macbook Pro, and that MacOS had become a fairly refined, polished desktop environment with a CLI, macports, and a decent selection of applications.
Not only is apple now hostile but it's actively dangerous and harmful to its users' data, as shown in the example linked in this post, because if you go with the "online" apple account you risk getting locked out of everything you were using on a regular day-to-day basis.
Now if we have to think of Apple as a hostile entity that is doing the same shit as microsoft, it makes me very disappointed.