This requirement just does not make sense to me. Why would Microsoft even have this requirement? Do they want to force users into an account so it is easier to lead them into Office packages? It can't be for greater data profiles on users since they could do this in other less explicit ways. Microsoft just doesn't have the ecosystem like Apple to make this worthwhile from their point of view or the users.
To be honest, I think it’s as simple as it being a better experience for the type of people who would buy the Home edition.
Forcing them to log in with a MS account allows MS to provide a lot of the services people expect using Android or iOS as their primary devices. For one thing, both those devices pretty much require an online account as well. And they contain far more sensitive data.
But more importantly, they also provide frictionless backups, syncing, and a whole host of online services as table stakes, and MS wants to do the same.
"I think it’s as simple as it being a better experience for the type of people who would buy the Home edition.
... allows MS to provide a lot of the services people expect using Android or iOS as their primary devices.
This. 100 times.
The main compute device people as a population are familiar with is the cellphone/tablet, and usage patterns that differ from this are becoming the odd man out.
Consumer tech. Commoditization. Etc.
We've come a long way from the 1970's. The computer as a commodity is actually not the same as a computer as a gizmo for the technically minded enthusiast.
Android devices give the users this choice. Android devices are definitely made for regular consumers.
Already, on Windows 10, all normal users used an MS account. The only way to get around it was to set up a computer without internet and then click some non obvious buttons while the computer begged for an MS account. If the goal was making it easy for normal users to have an MS account, Windows 10 succeeded.
The change here is that power users no longer have the choice to not use a cloud account. This change provides no benefit to the average user.
Another big one is being able to reset your laptop password without having to take your PC into the shop for someone to break into it. And if you turned on Bitlocker let's hope that they saved their recovery key or escrowed it to their MS account.
This is the biggest feature for my relatives who no longer feel dependent on a "tech person" to help them out.
> The main compute device people as a population are familiar with is the cellphone/tablet, and usage patterns that differ from this are becoming the odd man out.
(Smart)phones and tablets are not computing devices any more than a refrigerator. You cannot do any real work on them. Even finding a text editor, let alone editing, is a challenge. Other stuff like SW development or CAD/CAE is the same.
> Consumer tech. Commoditization. Etc.
Nothing to do with it. Just pure control and data collection.
> We've come a long way from the 1970's. The computer as a commodity is actually not the same as a computer as a gizmo for the technically minded enthusiast.
We are back in the 1960 with disabled user interfaces. When you need to search the internet to disable dark patterns is the same like reading the source code to check with which options to invoke the shell.
This is obviously and objectively untrue, and this attitude contributes to the exact problem that’s being pointed out above.
You can make a decent and convincing argument that consumer devices should be more open without trivialising the (very much real) work that many, many millions of users do with them.
> (Smart)phones and tablets are not computing devices any more than a refrigerator. You cannot do any real work on them.
Nonsense, of course you can. 'Real work' isn't just programming or whatever. Writers, painters and musicians do plenty of 'real work' on tablets and such.
Agreed. However I would just like to point out that since Apple refuses to provide a proper file shell or means to manage your files across applications on iPads (and iPhones as far as I'm aware) without resorting to some type of cloud situation, I prefer to use DAWs that run on native os systems like windows or macOS.
> Forcing them to log in with a MS account allows MS to provide a lot of the services people expect using Android or iOS as their primary devices. For one thing, both those devices pretty much require an online account as well. And they contain far more sensitive data.
The online account option let's MS provide these services. Forcing the account prevents users from opting out. Even on iOS, it is possible to use an iPhone without an Apple account. An iPhone b without an Apple account is severely handicapped by the inability to sideload apps. On Android it is not hard to set up an account without logging in to Google.
All true, but I also think it's kind of missing the point of the article a bit: which isn't that a Microsoft account is bad in itself, or even a bad default, but rather that they go out of their way to make it as hard as possible for you to opt-out of a Microsoft account as you need to play all sort of non-obvious tricks to do so. They could just have some small text with "no thanks" and a popup "you'll miss out on sync, backup, etc. are you sure?"
The objections are more abstract, as in "it's my bloody computer, allow me to do what I bloody want!" Well... Microsoft says no apparently.
Password recovery seems like another big reason to push this. Many consumers don't really have any tech support, aside from vendors like Dell or HP. With an MS account, Microsoft can manage this process.
How about security ? If MS needs to know your password than you can leave your computer without any password. Security is the same. Or you never heard of Solar Winds ?
So because you can log into a website with your Google account and theoretically this means that a malicious Google could log in as you this means you might as well let anyone log in as you?
Most consumers buy their PCs from big box vendors who can help with password recovery and whatnot. Microsoft might do it better, sure, but why would they want to pick up the cost of doing it themselves when they've been outsourcing it to OEMs for so long?
I disagree that most PC vendors are capable or good at helping consumers reset passwords of local Windows accounts. This is not a trivial process, take a look at the HP support page on this issue.
It's unlikely that people with Windows Home have a password reset disk and there's likely only the one account on the machine. That leaves them with "have a computer repair service recover your local password" or "reset your computer". In my opinion, the majority of people would be better served by a Microsoft account, where Microsoft can handle the reset through their website, rather than a password reset disk or wiping their machine in desperation.
Also note how excited HP is to get out of the business of handling this very situation.
> HP recommends using a Microsoft account for signing into Windows. Using a Microsoft account offers many benefits, including easy password recovery. If you currently have a local user account, consider switching to a Microsoft account after recovering or changing your current password.
> the type of people who would buy the Home edition
I haven't looked particularly into the differences between 'normal' Windows 10 and the other tiers but in the past, 'professional' versions were actually missing things (codecs etc.) that you'd want on a general usage PC.
As far as I know Windows 10 Pro has everything home has and more. You may be thinking of enterprise editions when you mention missing consumer features.
I am sure there are more, but the only things I know of that are in Pro and not Home are BitLocker and full Hyper-V. You still get WSL2 and Docker using Hyper-V under the hood on Home. There is also the Active Directory support, but unlikely an individual user cares much about that.
I can't really think of anything missing from Pro.
It already takes a lot of effort to configure Win10 with a local account; so much so that there's basically zero chance of somebody doing it by accident.
In addition to what others have said, Microsoft accounts back up your full disk encryption keys to the cloud.
Microsoft ships Bitlocker with every OS and given the TPM requirements one can speculate that it will be turned on by default on every Windows 11 computer.
I've seen an increase of tech support posts where people boot up their computer after an update or motherboard change and they're asked for Bitlocker decryption keys and they don't know what those are. Their data is lost forever. Their computers are bricked.
The experience of working in IT and modding online tech communities has taught me that computer literacy is very poor even among those who use computers every day. They're just appliances to most people. And this is OK. The problem is that the people who can't figure out what a right click does will never figure out how to back up their full disk encryption keys or even what they are.
Forcing a Microsoft account on Home SKUs eliminates this problem.
This is how Chromebooks work. A Google account is needed to sign-in. The motive is not mysterious -- I don't believe it is security, it is pushing free services to collect more data. We all know that selling people's data is deliriously profitable.
Of course, people will create less-attributable accounts.
Hopefully it will have to be disintegrated for enterprise customers who aren't going to use Microsoft accounts, and presumably for everybody. Antitrust prosecution might also help.
I suspect they are testing the waters and see how far they can go with W11. If there is enough outrage about a particular issue, they will simply drop it.
OneDrive, Edge (if you're into it) and setting sync.
What do you mean it does not makes sense? I am not using MS login myself but saying it doesn't make sense is ridiculous.
It's exactly same as what Apple does.
As for people who say it's required on Windows: It's not. You can create local account during setup, the link is there once you cancel your online login. It's hidden at first, but it's there. You don't even have to disconnect your internet or anything like that. Shit move by MS (dark UI pattern) but it is totally possible.
On Windows 10 Home, in latest releases, you actually need to disconnect the cable to get the move on without a Microsoft account links to show up. Word on the street is Windows 11 is going to make them actually mandatory on Home, instead of only pretend mandatory with lots of prompting.
I don't know about windows, but the comment you're replying to says microsoft encourages you to set up a online account (which I suspect most people outside of a domain would actually want), but allows you to set up a local account.
Yes it's a Dark UI pattern, but I have a feeling Apple do the same thing (I haven't set an apple laptop up for 8 years so my memory is vague)
It's possible to use the iCloud password instead of your local account password, but it's very opt-in and not at all suggested by default. Signing into iCloud doesn't replace anything about your local accounts besides that.
God damn it how many times I have to say it: it's not required on Windows as well! You click cancel, then click tiny link at bottom to create local account. You are talking about things you have no idea about man.
In the latest releases of Win 10 Home, at least once you have connected to the network, that button does not exist. They prompt you to enter your WiFi info first, then ask you to log in. And once you have entered the WiFi info you cannot get back to that screen and remove it until after you have set everything up. At least not without a factory reset, which I didn't actually try.
They force you to log in with a MS account during the initial setup then once you are in you can add a local admin account. Then you can log into it and remove the MS account. Its absolutely horrible.
I have been dealing with this a lot lately, had several laptops that were Home and could not get in to them without the MS account. Its a huge pain.
It seems you'll have to say it many times more untill this dark pattern will be removed. Apple uses the same teqchinque to trick you into using iCloud making it look like requrement for use your iPhone. For my taste it is cheating and dsigusting because even when you know it can be avoided you should work hard to find it especially when you are in a hurry and this trouble is by "design".
You can say it however many times you want, but you are wrong. You would have been right had you been talking about Windows 10 Home ~1-2 years ago.
But today, Windows 10 Home only gives you the option to login with a local account if you are offline (no cable, no WiFi) or you fail to login to an MS account multiple times. Only in one of those cases do they give you a small, relatively hidden option to use the local account.
There is zero-touch enterprise provisioning available, that requires you to be connected to a suitably configured local network (if learns about what it needs from dhcp tags), but this is not something that normal users need to be concerned about. For a non-MDM-managed mac, you can do everything offline just fine. Or you can be online, if you do not want to use iCloud account (I'm not using it either), you can finish the OOBE wizard and everything will be just like the user wants.
Yes. Well, BitLocker is in Pro, Pro for Workstations and Enterprise. Same for Hyper-V, if that matters to you; not available in Home.
Home edition is for non-commercial use. I don't know if that's in the EULA or not, but that's the use case that Home is meant for.
Pro and higher are for work use cases, and features add on as you go up the line. Pro for Workstations and Enterprise support slightly different feature sets, IIRC. Creating new ReFS filesystems is only available on Pro for Workstations, for example.
The other benefits of Pro for Workstations is a higher RAM limit (2TB vs 6TB) and socket count (2 CPU sockets vs 4 CPU sockets), NVDIMM-N support, and SMB Direct. Not normally features that would be missed on a normal PC.
