Agreed. What’s more, I find iCloud’s implementation in MacOS to be far less intrusive than OneDrive in Windows, which constantly pushes me to use it as a default, and has at least once unilaterally forced the issue during an update by moving my home folders into OneDrive, and leaving an absolutely wild text file titled “Where Did My Files Go.txt” on the desktop. If I don’t want to use iCloud, I can easily forget it exists.

I’m not terribly partisan when it comes to platforms, I own and actively use an M1 Mac Mini, Dell Precision running Windows, and a Kubuntu box. I understand the assertion that software ecosystems tend to be a featured player in tactics aimed to fix users on a particular device or platform, and I think there’s plenty of evidence that this is broadly the case. But I wouldn’t use iCloud as a particularly good example of it, Apple’s clearly not banking on their cloud storage to drive its revenue.

Can you? You can skip using the measly iCloud storage I guess. But can you activate a phone without an apple id?