Am I being too stubborn for not wanting a cloud account tied to my desktop operating system?

What challenge has been overcome?

I can see that hardware was bought, and that's cool hardware and all, but consumption is rather uninspiring.

I suppose it's the arm64 part? Or the review of some new hardware other people might be interested in?

Windows Pro > Work or School Account > Join a Domain instead > Set password & recovery questions

The one component here that is not present on most machines straight from the manufacturer is the presence of the Pro version. The home version of windows requires the account with increasingly limited alternatives.

Coding while flying is often the use case people bring up, but the power brick these laptops come with sometimes trip the plane's power plug in coach and you can't run local AI on battery for long. Also, over time planes will get better connectivity (Starlink etc.) and that particular full-offline scenario will go away.

For gaming, there are better options with dedicated GPUs like the Asus Zephyrus and similar.

What am I missing?

The OS makes a big difference for most developers, and the DGX Spark stack and experience is mature.

but separately everything about Microsoft’s login experience is pure pain.

Multiple broken redirects, broken links, buttons that loop, and more just to hit a CAPTCHA AI can solve anyway.

The only thing worse is for the poor soul developers who have had to login to their dev portal to setup SSO Microsoft for an app. It’s the worst I have ever seen in my life (even using Supabase that hand holds you through it).