Any OS vendor that tries to trick or harangue you into signing into/up for cloud services and telemetry before you even log into your device for the first time

Any OS vendor that tries to trick or harangue you into signing into/up for cloud services and telemetry before you even log into your device for the first time is absolutely not privacy-oriented. That Apple automatically opts users into everything and tries to alarm them with popups if they dare opt out should have made things clear enough. The only way that Apple has managed to seem even sort of focused on customer privacy is that Microsoft is my now so god-awful and free software desktops are so marginal that most people no longer trulyv remember what it's like to even set up a system whose mission is not to monetize the user by plugging them into a ton of services that collect data about them. The only companies not tempted to do this are (some of) the ones that don't collect data like this in the first place.