Microsoft is finally doing it: Even Windows 11 Pro will soon require a MS Acc.

[Bud]

I do not believe in a SkyNet type of mothership computer idea, where all accumulated data from the Humanity is stored, all of which can evaporate should a disaster strike.

[mansaxel]

Having your desktop, application configuration and data tied to an online account which can be trivially synced to a different computer is a convenience which people appreciate. It's a big reason why Chromebooks work so well for education.

I store all important data on my network file system. And that is not a commercial product, (well, people have made compatible commercial products, though) and I run it 100% myself, and it's on computers I control.  I expect and achieve the situation that all my computers expose the same home directory, per user, wherever they are.

Not surprisingly, Windows is somewhat complicated to integrate in this; the only thing they got right in that soup is to make AD use Kerberos V.

[MrMobodies]

I wouldn't myself depend on online storage for anything serious, I'd just use it as a temporary convenience knowing it could disappear one day and I keep everything at home and run my own things where I have access to it all the time.

It's nice to have both a bit like security in retain it and many copies across different remote storage not just one "cloud" just incase something happens to one of them and inhouse but then got to read the terms and conditions for it to be private. I'd imagine that would be included by paying for it compared to a free service.

[Marco]

It's nice to have options, but without the option to do it transparently and automatically it's going to create trouble down the line for Microsoft (and with Microsoft also desktop Linux, because consumer windows keeps the PC market alive).

For now only Chromebooks are really user friendly in this regard, which only has a limited danger to Microsoft ... but if Apple joins in and Microsoft is last one out it will be a problem.

[PKTKS]

I use my PC for engineering work. Not sure what that 'sync' stuff is either , I have no use for it.

If you've changed PCs you have manually synced your data, you have use for your old data on a new PC. The future for modern software will be to make all that transparent and automated ...

(...)

This can easily derail in long flaming opinions... 

But let's talk reasonably  serious...

Who really in perfect mental health behind a professional business will  just ditch all his proprietary  project data into MS business as default ...   
(let's just assume a 5y old life cycle project... MS has no patience...hhhhhh  )

Just because their cash need demands deprecating PCs at dozen weeks pace and making a consistent USER PROPERTY DATA a priority is no longer their cash cow?

Cm'on  on any *NIX you save your data under /home with proper partition attrs. and you can just upgrade the whole else system (partitions)  with 100% safety of your data..

I have been doing this since 1990s  and have already files dated with 1993 attributes ...

If i had not such capability I would be out the things. and just extorted by these methods..

For a 5y old kid and his Alphabet  applets it sounds..
Even my nephew can already use a MINT machine for his games..

I really dunno want to see him hostage of such *** buzz... in his life..

GROUND  ZERO is not even thinkable..
Why people accepts such a thing..

Paul

[Marco]

Who really in perfect mental health behind a professional business will  just ditch all his proprietary  project data into MS business as default ...   

Lots of money going into DaaS on Azure (stack), so plenty. Though I think cloud syncing of a desktop is more useful than DaaS, it works when the network is down.

Cm'on  on any *NIX you save your data under /home with proper partition attrs. and you can just upgrade the whole else system (partitions)  with 100% safety of your data..

Which does nothing for the average private user or Windows. For businesses Windows users the sysadmin can take care of it, possibly with some third party solutions like ProfileUnity, but that also does nothing for private users.

Office users are the major money maker for desktop windows, consumers are the secondary money makers, what you call professional business users are an accounting error ... not what should dictate the major design aims for Windows.

[Someone]

It's nice to have options, but without the option to do it transparently and automatically it's going to create trouble down the line for Microsoft (and with Microsoft also desktop Linux, because consumer windows keeps the PC market alive).

For now only Chromebooks are really user friendly in this regard, which only has a limited danger to Microsoft ... but if Apple joins in and Microsoft is last one out it will be a problem.

Consider that the majority of web browsing is now from mobile devices:
https://techjury.net/blog/web-browser-market-share/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-traffic-coming-from-mobile-devices/
So a big portion of the computing world is already happening from devices that have some cloud sync/backup.

As you say, Apple could roll that to their desktop multiuser environment (who has or wants a multiuser phone?) and quickly have something disruptive in the education/corporate space. But although they pushed hard on that market with OSX server it never really took off and got buried. Seems like the profit is in consumers and their vanity shiny toys.

[Cerebus]

As you say, Apple could roll that to their desktop multiuser environment (who has or wants a multiuser phone?) and quickly have something disruptive in the education/corporate space. But although they pushed hard on that market with OSX server it never really took off and got buried. Seems like the profit is in consumers and their vanity shiny toys.

You're a bit behind the times, one has been able to do this for ages on macOS. You can selectively store all sorts of data automatically synced to iCloud, from the contents of your home directory, browser bookmarks, contacts, passwords, calendar, email, photos etc. through to data from apps with specific iCloud support baked in. Relevant bits are even shared with associated iPhones and iPads automatically. Anything signed in with your apple id has access to it. If you took the fullest set of options you could switch to a new Mac (or a freshly minted local account on someone else's Mac), sync all your stuff from iCloud and have a machine set up exactly like your other(s) in the time it took for the sync to happen.

The erstwhile server version of OS X provided much the same facilities, but not quite so extensive. The principal difference is that the OS X server based version used mostly open interfaces so it was easy to divert some services to platforms other than OS X (i.e. one might choose to store home directories on an NFS server) and there was OKish management tools to allow you to do this. You could even cobble together a set-up that looked to an OS X client as if it was OS X server, but was actually provided entirely on Linux, BSD, Solaris or whatever you chose, even down to the directory service that glued it all together. In fact that was how I previously had home set up - you could take a brand new Mac out of the box, plug it into the network, option click at login, and have it copy all one's settings, home directory and preferences onto the new machine and then keep it all in sync henceforth automatically. iCloud is really just a smoother, more all-encompassing version of that.

Those older interfaces are still mostly there if you know how to use them, but they aren't promoted the way they used to be. Facilities introduced for iCloud since the demise of OS X server are difficult or impossible to divert to infrastructure of one's own choosing which is a pity when compared with the old way of doing it.

Most importantly, you can still choose to use none of this and have your macOS computer sitting in glorious isolation, with no need for an apple id, iCloud or any of that stuff and still be able to make full use of it. The only thing you'd lose is tight automatic integration with iPhones and iPads, but you wouldn't lose all integration with iPhones and iPads, it would just be a bit muted and more manual.

[Someone]

As you say, Apple could roll that to their desktop multiuser environment (who has or wants a multiuser phone?) and quickly have something disruptive in the education/corporate space. But although they pushed hard on that market with OSX server it never really took off and got buried. Seems like the profit is in consumers and their vanity shiny toys.

You're a bit behind the times, one has been able to do this for ages on macOS. You can selectively store all sorts of data automatically synced to iCloud, from the contents of your home directory, browser bookmarks, contacts, passwords, calendar, email, photos etc. through to data from apps with specific iCloud support baked in.

As I recall all that icloud stuff is per application, and isnt tied/integrated with the login (or system settings etc). Device enrollment of OSX can do some of that but isnt consumer facing.

As a consumer, on iOS with icloud backups you can enter your account credentials (twice?) on a different device and have it sync the whole device. Light years ahead of desktop sync solutions (which I believe was the point Marco was making).

[Marco]

Indeed, but Apple has the advantage of a tighter hold on their developers. They can simply go to the developers and say "be a good citizen with your auto-backup directories and don't put too much stuff in them or else". After that is done they can offer a free tier sync/backup (well low cost any way, it is Apple) with more costly tiers for backing up media and user downloads.

[Cerebus]

As you say, Apple could roll that to their desktop multiuser environment (who has or wants a multiuser phone?) and quickly have something disruptive in the education/corporate space. But although they pushed hard on that market with OSX server it never really took off and got buried. Seems like the profit is in consumers and their vanity shiny toys.

You're a bit behind the times, one has been able to do this for ages on macOS. You can selectively store all sorts of data automatically synced to iCloud, from the contents of your home directory, browser bookmarks, contacts, passwords, calendar, email, photos etc. through to data from apps with specific iCloud support baked in.

As I recall all that icloud stuff is per application, and isnt tied/integrated with the login (or system settings etc). Device enrollment of OSX can do some of that but isnt consumer facing.

As a consumer, on iOS with icloud backups you can enter your account credentials (twice?) on a different device and have it sync the whole device. Light years ahead of desktop sync solutions (which I believe was the point Marco was making).

No, the desktop sync can do pretty much all the same things as the iDevice sync - go to System Preferences, Apple ID, enter your apple id, maybe change some of the iCloud preference to limit what is synced and off it goes. The only place I'm certain it is different is if you have desktop applications that weren't loaded via the desktop app store, those obviously won't automatically install; whereas ones that are from the desktop app store will as long as you have the "Automatically download apps purchased on other devices" preference selected.

I have just logged in remotely to SWMBO's Mac from mine, entered my Apple ID and everything that I have selected to use iCloud (I have deliberately deselected some things) automagically appeared on her Mac, System Preferences, Contacts, Calendar, all the other stuff are up to date with my Mac. The only significant difference is the contents of my home directory becuase I have deliberately chosen to not store that synced to iCloud. Seamless, and trivial enough to do that I could do it just so as I could say I have just for the purposes of this post.

Edit: Just to drum the point home I'm adding this edit on SWMBO's Mac, where my bookmark for eevblog, and my login credentials, had been magically synced so I can log into eevblog from there/here without any effort.

[Bud]

Steve Jobs was obsessed with the idea of centralizing of personal information management way back to his younger times and there is a video where he talks about it. He called it "the Hub" back then. First it was the individual Mac computer where the users would store their all kind of information (per Job's vision) then the Mac Media center, the iPod, then the iPhone and now ended up with the iCloud.

[Marco]

No, the desktop sync can do pretty much all the same things as the iDevice sync - go to System Preferences, Apple ID, enter your apple id, maybe change some of the iCloud preference to limit what is synced and off it goes.

So when you log onto a fresh macbook it can automatically download all your applications from the appstore, restore system and application settings and backed up directories? All you have to do is logon and sync?

That only furthers my opinion how far behind the curve Microsoft is.

[Someone]

As you say, Apple could roll that to their desktop multiuser environment (who has or wants a multiuser phone?) and quickly have something disruptive in the education/corporate space. But although they pushed hard on that market with OSX server it never really took off and got buried. Seems like the profit is in consumers and their vanity shiny toys.

You're a bit behind the times, one has been able to do this for ages on macOS. You can selectively store all sorts of data automatically synced to iCloud, from the contents of your home directory, browser bookmarks, contacts, passwords, calendar, email, photos etc. through to data from apps with specific iCloud support baked in.

As I recall all that icloud stuff is per application, and isnt tied/integrated with the login (or system settings etc). Device enrollment of OSX can do some of that but isnt consumer facing.

As a consumer, on iOS with icloud backups you can enter your account credentials (twice?) on a different device and have it sync the whole device. Light years ahead of desktop sync solutions (which I believe was the point Marco was making).

No, the desktop sync can do pretty much all the same things as the iDevice sync - go to System Preferences, Apple ID, enter your apple id, maybe change some of the iCloud preference to limit what is synced and off it goes. The only place I'm certain it is different is if you have desktop applications that weren't loaded via the desktop app store, those obviously won't automatically install; whereas ones that are from the desktop app store will as long as you have the "Automatically download apps purchased on other devices" preference selected.

I have just logged in remotely to SWMBO's Mac from mine, entered my Apple ID and everything that I have selected to use iCloud (I have deliberately deselected some things) automagically appeared on her Mac, System Preferences, Contacts, Calendar, all the other stuff are up to date with my Mac. The only significant difference is the contents of my home directory becuase I have deliberately chosen to not store that synced to iCloud. Seamless, and trivial enough to do that I could do it just so as I could say I have just for the purposes of this post.

Edit: Just to drum the point home I'm adding this edit on SWMBO's Mac, where my bookmark for eevblog, and my login credentials, had been magically synced so I can log into eevblog from there/here without any effort.

Again, you jump to the things that are integrated with apps (from the app store!). Yes, its there. But its nothing like the all encompassing user provisioning that was deployed on OSX in the past.

Right now a home user can do time machine backups to their own storage, and that is a bootable image that can re-image a clean machine with everything just as it was (I've done it a few times myself). But there isnt a corresponding cloud option...  an odd gap in the market.

That is very different to the mechanism that iOS uses to do its "backups", approved apps with their data in their approved storage containers being backed up via icloud. Sure many users wouldn't tell the difference, but you keep talking like its completely the same thing when it isnt. So much user config/content is lost through those, sure blame the app developers, but its still an issue compared to a real backup.

Corporate provisioning and multiuser environments just worked for OSX in the past, seamless login to arbitrary hardware (even across different OS versions) and all your software, settings, and data was right there on the local storage. Some home users would like that sort of setup, and if that can be done by a cheap and well integrated cloud solution I'm sure it will be disruptive (as Marco says).

Back on topic, all this icloud stuff needs you to authenticate your OS and software with your account, apple got there first and has not had massive pushback on it.

[Someone]

No, the desktop sync can do pretty much all the same things as the iDevice sync - go to System Preferences, Apple ID, enter your apple id, maybe change some of the iCloud preference to limit what is synced and off it goes.

So when you log onto a fresh macbook it can automatically download all your applications from the appstore, restore system and application settings and backed up directories? All you have to do is logon and sync?

That only furthers my opinion how far behind the curve Microsoft is.

Backed up directories, Yes. Everything else, Yes*
iCloud+ plans and pricing: https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201238

* according to what the apps think they need, which might disagree with what you want

So its not pushed as an official or supported backup solution.

[Cerebus]

So its not pushed as an official or supported backup solution.

That's because it's not a backup solution, it's a mobility solution. It merely looks like a backup solution to the naïve, it's won't help you recover a file you deleted yesterday because it will propagate that deletion to one's other Macs/iDevices via iCloud.

[Someone]

So its not pushed as an official or supported backup solution.

That's because it's not a backup solution, it's a mobility solution. It merely looks like a backup solution to the naïve, it's won't help you recover a file you deleted yesterday because it will propagate that deletion to one's other Macs/iDevices via iCloud.

So you think you are clever:

except....
https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/icloud/mmae56ea1ca5/icloud
"Recover deleted files on iCloud.com"
Yeah, sounds like a backup.
Some people have reported it as being a bit glitchy, but the underlying functionality is there and could be turned into full versioning/history like time machine.

[Cerebus]

As you say, Apple could roll that to their desktop multiuser environment (who has or wants a multiuser phone?) and quickly have something disruptive in the education/corporate space. But although they pushed hard on that market with OSX server it never really took off and got buried. Seems like the profit is in consumers and their vanity shiny toys.

You're a bit behind the times, one has been able to do this for ages on macOS. You can selectively store all sorts of data automatically synced to iCloud, from the contents of your home directory, browser bookmarks, contacts, passwords, calendar, email, photos etc. through to data from apps with specific iCloud support baked in.

As I recall all that icloud stuff is per application, and isnt tied/integrated with the login (or system settings etc). Device enrollment of OSX can do some of that but isnt consumer facing.

As a consumer, on iOS with icloud backups you can enter your account credentials (twice?) on a different device and have it sync the whole device. Light years ahead of desktop sync solutions (which I believe was the point Marco was making).

No, the desktop sync can do pretty much all the same things as the iDevice sync - go to System Preferences, Apple ID, enter your apple id, maybe change some of the iCloud preference to limit what is synced and off it goes. The only place I'm certain it is different is if you have desktop applications that weren't loaded via the desktop app store, those obviously won't automatically install; whereas ones that are from the desktop app store will as long as you have the "Automatically download apps purchased on other devices" preference selected.

I have just logged in remotely to SWMBO's Mac from mine, entered my Apple ID and everything that I have selected to use iCloud (I have deliberately deselected some things) automagically appeared on her Mac, System Preferences, Contacts, Calendar, all the other stuff are up to date with my Mac. The only significant difference is the contents of my home directory becuase I have deliberately chosen to not store that synced to iCloud. Seamless, and trivial enough to do that I could do it just so as I could say I have just for the purposes of this post.

Edit: Just to drum the point home I'm adding this edit on SWMBO's Mac, where my bookmark for eevblog, and my login credentials, had been magically synced so I can log into eevblog from there/here without any effort.

Again, you jump to the things that are integrated with apps (from the app store!). Yes, its there. But its nothing like the all encompassing user provisioning that was deployed on OSX in the past.

Right now a home user can do time machine backups to their own storage, and that is a bootable image that can re-image a clean machine with everything just as it was (I've done it a few times myself). But there isnt a corresponding cloud option...  an odd gap in the market.

That is very different to the mechanism that iOS uses to do its "backups", approved apps with their data in their approved storage containers being backed up via icloud. Sure many users wouldn't tell the difference, but you keep talking like its completely the same thing when it isnt. So much user config/content is lost through those, sure blame the app developers, but its still an issue compared to a real backup.

Corporate provisioning and multiuser environments just worked for OSX in the past, seamless login to arbitrary hardware (even across different OS versions) and all your software, settings, and data was right there on the local storage. Some home users would like that sort of setup, and if that can be done by a cheap and well integrated cloud solution I'm sure it will be disruptive (as Marco says).

Back on topic, all this icloud stuff needs you to authenticate your OS and software with your account, apple got there first and has not had massive pushback on it.

You seem to be trying to deliberately muddy the waters. The only apps that have to be iCloud aware are apps that you want to store stuff in iCloud if you don't store your home directory there, if you do keep your home directory in iCloud then any app will sync, whether it came from the app store or outside of it. You are the only person talking about backup, we are talking about a solution that lets one seamlessly move one's working environment around between computers. The only way it resembles backup is that one can recreate one's working environment on another Mac. The same is true for an iPhone or iPad, being able to 'restore' your working environment to a new or freshly wiped iDevice isn't backup, it doesn't let you recover a file you've deleted. It's just mobility between devices that can all coexist. Similarly nobody is pretending it's a corporate provisioning platform, it's not - although Apple have some tools for that in Apple Business Manager, but just not the nice integrated solution that OS X Server had in its day.

[Cerebus]

So its not pushed as an official or supported backup solution.

That's because it's not a backup solution, it's a mobility solution. It merely looks like a backup solution to the naïve, it's won't help you recover a file you deleted yesterday because it will propagate that deletion to one's other Macs/iDevices via iCloud.

So you think you are clever:

except....
https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/icloud/mmae56ea1ca5/icloud
"Recover deleted files on iCloud.com"
Yeah, sounds like a backup.
Some people have reported it as being a bit glitchy, but the underlying functionality is there and could be turned into full versioning/history like time machine.

You seem to fail to discern the difference between pedantically correct and actually correct. iCloud is not, repeat, not a backup solution except for the naïve or stupid. I fully encourage you to store something vital in iCloud, delete it, and try and get it back in 31 days. The existence of an incidental emergency recovery system for recently deleted files does not a backup system make, heck my waste bin usually has older deleted files than that in it (Checks: Yup, it does).

Now, before you get all pedantically correct about it, yes, iCloud does act as an emergency backup for a lost phone, but that's a far cry from what we were actually talking about, which is the ability to have seamless iDevice like syncing across apple desktops and your ignorance that it was already here and had been for a long time.

Now TimeMachine is a backup solution and comes free with all Macs, and mine has every change I've made on this machine going back to October 2019 when I first fired it up when this machine was new.

Now forgive me if I stop arguing with you about this, but you just seem to be here for an argument for it's own sake, not a discussion where we all learn something.

[Someone]

You seem to be trying to deliberately muddy the waters. The only apps that have to be iCloud aware are apps that you want to store stuff in iCloud if you don't store your home directory there, if you do keep your home directory in iCloud then any app will sync, whether it came from the app store or outside of it. You are the only person talking about backup, we are talking about a solution that lets one seamlessly move one's working environment around between computers. The only way it resembles backup is that one can recreate one's working environment on another Mac. The same is true for an iPhone or iPad, being able to 'restore' your working environment to a new or freshly wiped iDevice isn't backup, it doesn't let you recover a file you've deleted. It's just mobility between devices that can all coexist. Similarly nobody is pretending it's a corporate provisioning platform, it's not - although Apple have some tools for that in Apple Business Manager, but just not the nice integrated solution that OS X Server had in its day.

Read back through the replies, you are the one sidetracking the thread with your slanty arguments. Why are you bringing in all the minutiae of how icloud sync includes some files/apps and not others? Its not going to give a user all their apps and settings on another device unless they are working inside a restricted situation, it might but its not seamless (or as Marco put it "transparently and automatically") because there are so many ifs/buts/gotchas. You keep coming back saying how its great and works for migrating a user with no problems, except it does have obvious problems and isnt what Marco was talking about:

Having your desktop, application configuration and data tied to an online account which can be trivially synced to a different computer is a convenience which people appreciate. It's a big reason why Chromebooks work so well for education.

So why are you (Cerebus) jumping into the middle of that discussion with some other unstated motivation and disagreeing with my points (while being factually incorrect) ? Its trivial to point out how you are wrong, can you not frame/craft a context to explain yourself?

[Someone]

So its not pushed as an official or supported backup solution.

That's because it's not a backup solution, it's a mobility solution. It merely looks like a backup solution to the naïve, it's won't help you recover a file you deleted yesterday because it will propagate that deletion to one's other Macs/iDevices via iCloud.

So you think you are clever:

except....
https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/icloud/mmae56ea1ca5/icloud
"Recover deleted files on iCloud.com"
Yeah, sounds like a backup.
Some people have reported it as being a bit glitchy, but the underlying functionality is there and could be turned into full versioning/history like time machine.

You seem to fail to discern the difference between pedantically correct and actually correct. iCloud is not, repeat, not a backup solution except for the naïve or stupid. I fully encourage you to store something vital in iCloud, delete it, and try and get it back in 31 days

Ah, walking the goalposts. +1 troll point to you sir.

Now, before you get all pedantically correct about it, yes, iCloud does act as an emergency backup for a lost phone, but that's a far cry from what we were actually talking about, which is the ability to have seamless iDevice like syncing across apple desktops and your ignorance that it was already here and had been for a long time.

Except you just keep saying its there, when it is actually incomplete and not able to sync everything. I keep repeating and you keep ignoring:
icloud is a partial solution and probably 90% of the way there for most users
its problems are less obvious on the restricted iOS platform, on OSX it's still very patchy. Good news is that is has been ...slowly.... improving.

[Cerebus]

You seem to be trying to deliberately muddy the waters. The only apps that have to be iCloud aware are apps that you want to store stuff in iCloud if you don't store your home directory there, if you do keep your home directory in iCloud then any app will sync, whether it came from the app store or outside of it. You are the only person talking about backup, we are talking about a solution that lets one seamlessly move one's working environment around between computers. The only way it resembles backup is that one can recreate one's working environment on another Mac. The same is true for an iPhone or iPad, being able to 'restore' your working environment to a new or freshly wiped iDevice isn't backup, it doesn't let you recover a file you've deleted. It's just mobility between devices that can all coexist. Similarly nobody is pretending it's a corporate provisioning platform, it's not - although Apple have some tools for that in Apple Business Manager, but just not the nice integrated solution that OS X Server had in its day.

Read back through the replies, you are the one sidetracking the thread with your slanty arguments. Why are you bringing in all the minutiae of how icloud sync includes some files/apps and not others? Its not going to give a user all their apps and settings on another device unless they are working inside a restricted situation, it might but its not seamless (or as Marco put it "transparently and automatically") because there are so many ifs/buts/gotchas. You keep coming back saying how its great and works for migrating a user with no problems, except it does have obvious problems and isnt what Marco was talking about:

Having your desktop, application configuration and data tied to an online account which can be trivially synced to a different computer is a convenience which people appreciate. It's a big reason why Chromebooks work so well for education.

So why are you (Cerebus) jumping into the middle of that discussion with some other unstated motivation and disagreeing with my points (while being factually incorrect) ? Its trivial to point out how you are wrong, can you not frame/craft a context to explain yourself?

Marco says that, you say "Apple could roll that to their desktop multiuser environment", I effectively say "You're behind the times, they have rolled that out" and you just try to make an argument out of it all, wrongly claiming some underhand motivation, wrongly claiming that I'm factually incorrect when I went and explicitly tested it and it worked "automatically and seamlessly".

Just because I'm careful about qualifying what it can do under different circumstances you seem to want to cast as some sort of equivocation. Let me state simply and plainly "You can seamlessly and automatically sync user environments between desktop Macs via iCloud if you accept the default setting. that Apple suggest you use." - I do not use those default settings, so I have to qualify what I say about my proving it works for me. It works. It will continue to work whatever you say or chose to believe about it.

I really don't get what you think you'll achieve by being so confrontational and argumentative except to convince me, and I suspect others, that you're a bit of dick and not worth the effort. Now, I have to go and add you to my ignore list as clearly "There's no talking to people like that".

[Someone]

You seem to be trying to deliberately muddy the waters. The only apps that have to be iCloud aware are apps that you want to store stuff in iCloud if you don't store your home directory there, if you do keep your home directory in iCloud then any app will sync, whether it came from the app store or outside of it. You are the only person talking about backup, we are talking about a solution that lets one seamlessly move one's working environment around between computers. The only way it resembles backup is that one can recreate one's working environment on another Mac. The same is true for an iPhone or iPad, being able to 'restore' your working environment to a new or freshly wiped iDevice isn't backup, it doesn't let you recover a file you've deleted. It's just mobility between devices that can all coexist. Similarly nobody is pretending it's a corporate provisioning platform, it's not - although Apple have some tools for that in Apple Business Manager, but just not the nice integrated solution that OS X Server had in its day.

Read back through the replies, you are the one sidetracking the thread with your slanty arguments. Why are you bringing in all the minutiae of how icloud sync includes some files/apps and not others? Its not going to give a user all their apps and settings on another device unless they are working inside a restricted situation, it might but its not seamless (or as Marco put it "transparently and automatically") because there are so many ifs/buts/gotchas. You keep coming back saying how its great and works for migrating a user with no problems, except it does have obvious problems and isnt what Marco was talking about:

Having your desktop, application configuration and data tied to an online account which can be trivially synced to a different computer is a convenience which people appreciate. It's a big reason why Chromebooks work so well for education.

So why are you (Cerebus) jumping into the middle of that discussion with some other unstated motivation and disagreeing with my points (while being factually incorrect) ? Its trivial to point out how you are wrong, can you not frame/craft a context to explain yourself?

Marco says that, you say "Apple could roll that to their desktop multiuser environment", I effectively say "You're behind the times, they have rolled that out" and you just try to make an argument out of it all, wrongly claiming some underhand motivation, wrongly claiming that I'm factually incorrect when I went and explicitly tested it and it worked "automatically and seamlessly".

Just because I'm careful about qualifying what it can do under different circumstances you seem to want to cast as some sort of equivocation. Let me state simply and plainly "You can seamlessly and automatically sync user environments between desktop Macs via iCloud if you accept the default setting. that Apple suggest you use." - I do not use those default settings, so I have to qualify what I say about my proving it works for me. It works. It will continue to work whatever you say or chose to believe about it.

I really don't get what you think you'll achieve by being so confrontational and argumentative except to convince me, and I suspect others, that you're a bit of dick and not worth the effort. Now, I have to go and add you to my ignore list as clearly "There's no talking to people like that".

You keep saying it will work for everyone, from the experience it worked for your use case (which is in many ways a corner case). Its not a general solution yet, but you claim its already there again and again. Its like you have turned Falsifiable upside down. You keep talking in generalizations which are falsifiable, and use them as some argument to refute what I am saying. Then come back and dig your heels in when its pointed out you are wrong/misleading.

If you took the fullest set of options you could switch to a new Mac (or a freshly minted local account on someone else's Mac), sync all your stuff from iCloud and have a machine set up exactly like your other(s) in the time it took for the sync to happen.

Which is factually incorrect if the user has any applications not from the app store (and if you want to be pedantic, a bunch of system settings are not synced). I dont get why you are so dismissive of the fact there are many traps and preconditions to the icloud system. When it works it seems like magic, but its opaque and not going to  take an arbitrary desktop setup to another device.

[MrMobodies]

There must be an edition they'd release like LTSC that doesn't require a sign in setup thing.

Joke: I don't think certain businesses and banks would tolerate that say if one of their cash machines were running windows 10 Pro and given the opportunity (if their firewall happened to allow it by mistake) would download stuff like CandyCrush and other promotional things and run frequent updates and monitoring on them in the background as well as the telemetry stuff.

[Halcyon]

There must be an edition they'd release like LTSC that doesn't require a sign in setup thing.

There will always be "offline" options with Windows, just like with Windows 10. In some corporate and government (high security) environments, there is no internet connectivity... ever and that's often mandated by cyber security policies and even legislation at times. There is no way on earth Microsoft will ever turn around to those organisations and say "just temporarily connect your devices/network to the internet". That will not can't happen.

How that will look in Windows 11 and whether or not it will be easily accessible to end-users/regular consumers is yet to be seen.