Nah the iCloud crap is literally just another account. Up until the moment you login to it, then it silently ties the device to that account for "security" purposes. I kept emailing the IT guy back saying I don't know what I can do, I can see a list of devices here and that laptop has been removed from it.

After him asking me for help repeatedly I felt I had to just give up, give him the password on a slack call, then immediately reset it once he'd done what he needed.

It was a small company, as he said elsewhere, negating your first 4 options, and the last two of blaming the user are equally stupid because Apple can fix this and doesn't want to. Not everybody has an MDM tool which can set up ownership right for Apple devices - and they should not have to

It's shameful that you have a bunch of upvotes and he's getting downvotes

You are bending over backwards to justify absolute garbage practices. I am aware there were literally other ways around this. I was more referring to being forced into a situation where I'd even need to consider this.

Yes, I shouldn't have used my personal account... however I also should have never expected doing so to tell apple "I own this shit please make sure no one else can use it ever without my permission". Logging into iCloud should mean "I want to use iCloud", which btw I NEVER wanted to do. Every time I opened system settings the piece of shit insisted I login to it. That alone is a problem. But I'm sure you'll justify that one too.

Fortunately, apple and google corporate policy != law. If a company buys a device... and let's an employee use it. There's no amount of rules or policy that makes it the employee's property. It's company property. If you want to claim it's employee property then you'd at the very least be lying to the IRS as it would be considered a form of payment.

The real unfortunate part is that Apple or Google will never be incentivized to fix it because in this case you as the employee would be on the hook for "theft"/bricking of the device.

This is nonsense and violates a few laws in plenty of places

You really earn your "apple simp" tag. You know apple doesn't give a fuck about you, actually.

And I really don't care about your invalidations of what happened to me. If by some chance I did make some other mistake besides using my personal apple account, it's irrelevant. I do not think it should be possible to accidentally opt in to this bullshit. It is a shitty feature to force on every user. And it shouldn't be possible for an employee to render thousands of dollars worth of company hardware useless trash ready for the landfill. It shouldn't be possible intentionally, let alone by accident. If you removed the apple schlong from you mouth for a second you might see my point but you won't.