Let’s not forget that Apple advertises paid subscriptions in notifications and settings pane alerts when you first buy the computer.
They offer free trials which you can’t cancel without immediately ending the trial. (E.g., you can’t turn off auto-renewing without forfeiting the trial)
A device that has ads and/or behavioral pushes to subscription services and costs $500 doesn’t really cost $500.
If they're just advertising those things when I first buy it then my annoyance is somewhere between negligible and $10.
- "Let’s not forget that Apple advertises paid subscriptions in notifications and settings pane alerts when you first buy the computer."
I've literally never seen an advert outside of a 3rd party app or website on any Apple device I've owned (many).
I just switched to an iPhone and I don’t know how this could possibly be the case for you. I get them from a bunch of Apple apps and even in the settings app.
If you mean Fitness alerts and others, you can simply turn off your notifications for them. It takes 10 seconds to disable all notifications for apps.
When you buy a new Apple device it comes with a trial for Apple subscription services. My iPhone 17 Pro came with a News+ trial.
If I didn’t cancel it it would charge me.
There was no way to turn off auto-renew without forfeiting the remaining trial period, which is a dark pattern to encourage accidental payments.
Mac devices also encourage things like documents in iCloud directly in settings which encourage migration to paid services.
By default, Apple apps like Music have notifications for subscriptions.
It’s not at the level of Windows 11 but it’s there when you’re really looking for it. Notifications in the system settings are not always critical update type of stuff, they are often semi-promotional.
> If I didn’t cancel it it would charge me.
This is absolutely, completely false. Apple devices do not come subscribed to things that will charge you if you don’t cancel. Don’t be silly.
I explained poorly. What I mean is that if you accept the free trial, you’ll be billed if you forget to cancel.
That’s fine and normal, but what’s not as normal is that there’s no way to turn off auto-renew and keep your trial period. You either decide to cancel now and lose the rest of the trial or you’ve got to set a reminder to cancel.
The thing is, at different points Apple has offered free subscriptions between 3-12 months depending on their promotion. So it’s a pretty enticing trial depending on what’s being offered.