LOL! You haven't seen the insides of recent Macs (read: since 2010), have you? Everything is soldered to the motherboard, the battery is glued to the case, etc. They're the pinnacle of non-repairability.
Sadly the machines from the repairable / upgradable era are getting to the end of their lifespan; at least with normal MacOS and standart software.
I'm writingh this on a 2010 mbp on it's third battery, second ram upgrade and new-ish SSD and i'don't know if my next machine will hold up ~10 years when nothing is easily replacable.
We replaced most of MacBooks last year when we got sick of waiting for a non-defective keyboard and maintaining a spare pool of $3000 laptops. The thin models use soldered memory, but are priced at a much lower margin. The slightly thicker models are still thinner and lighter than the MacBook Pros they replaced, and have user replaceable memory as well. In most cases, we just ordered more memory because HP doesn't gouge you, and our budget was built around MacBooks.
There was some grousing initially about leaving MacOS for Windows 10, but it went away fairly quickly, as Catalina really fubared stuff that our Mac users cared about around the same time, running MacOS in a business sucks anyway, and the Windows 10 linux stuff is good enough for our folks who were using a Mac for Unixy reasons.
Apple's thin and light principles make sense and are ultimately correct from a technical POV, but the business side uses it as a margin mining operation. 2020 isn't 2010 from a competitive POV, where Apple blew everyone away -- they lost focus in the 2014-15 timeframe and now focus on the ARM transition. Today, competitive forces drive thin & light among other vendors and ultimately result in a better outcome for most scenarios.
2) There is not a standard socket for all kinds of RAM (particularly some kinds of energy efficient RAM).
Which thin non-Apple laptop are you referring to?
I seriously doubt Apple gives a crap about whether or not people can upgrade their RAM. Hardly anyone does it even when they can, so it can't make much difference to their business model. Do you really think Apple are doing this so that a tiny fraction of people who would have just upgraded their RAM buy a new laptop instead?
The thin one is the x360, I don’t recall the other one — I don’t need more than 16GB.
I’m sure Apple doesn’t care at all — they removed the iMac memory slots and made storage replacement impossible for no real good reason at all as well. That combined with the gouging for additional capacity and the borderline fraud of shipping the defective keyboard for years was enough for me.
I liked MacOS a lot, but the companies behavior is a textbook example of why you need competitive forces in hardware.
The x360 is not thinner than a 13 inch MacBook Pro (1.58cm vs 1.56cm, according to the manufacturers). And according to the following data sheet, the LDDR-3 memory on the x360 is soldered onto the board: https://www8.hp.com/h20195/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4aa7-6087eee
Soldering on ultrafast SSDs does make sense for a number of reasons beyond just saving space. The higher the bandwidth, the more difficult it is to get data transfer working reliably when part of the electrical connection is made via a connector cable. Apple have some of the fastest SSD speeds out there.
There are similar issues with RAM. There's lots of crappy RAM on the market. If people started putting third party RAM in modern MacBooks, you'd get lots of issues with e.g. reliable suspend/resume. Some good discussion here: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-valid-technical-reason-for-....
The laptop options that are hyped up as being better than Apple almost always turn out to have a mythical element, on further investigation. If you want removable RAM and SSDs you can get them (yay free market!), but there's a real downside.
Apple has pretty much always placed an emphasis on compact (by the standards of the day) form factors for its laptops. Just buy from another manufacturer if that's not your thing. History has usually proved them correct. People used to complain about the lack of a CD drive.
Yet, these notebooks last really long. I usually use them for 5+ years. My mom has been using her‘s for almost 10 years and it still feels fast (for her needs).
And it‘s easily recycled afterwards. The RAM is rarely the issue and I know few non-technical people who ever changed their RAM in a notebook.
Sustainability is really important, but I don‘t think upgradable notebooks make a significant difference at all.
I'm writing this on a 2005 Thinkpad T42p. In the intervening years it has had its drive replaced by an SSD and an extended battery installed but that is about it. It still feels and looks newish, apart from the keyboard which show wear on the key caps. A new keyboard can be had for ~$20.
Hardware can be both long-lasting as well as upgradable.
I’m still using my non-upgradable base model 2013 Macbook Pro, while I don’t know anyone still using a 7 year old Windows/Linux laptop, even an upgraded one. It’s fallen on a cement floor multiple times and has had no damage from that. Repairability doesn’t matter if it doesn’t break in the first place, and there’s certainly been no problems with obsolescence, planned or otherwise.
I’ve got a Dell m4600 that I bought in 2011. I specifically chose it so that I could upgrade. It’s now got a new SSD, HDD and 24GB of RAM. It works well enough for most things, but not video editing.
There is no "planned obsolescence" from Apple, and btw, that phrase is not capitalized in English.
There is a popular myth among the lazy-minded about this, but the fact is that Apple's hardware lasts a lot longer, and is intentionally supported for a lot longer, than competing hardware. This is true for Macs as well as iOS devices. If Apple is "planning" for anything, it's for their stuff to last a lot longer than others' stuff, not the opposite.
Not everything has to be black and white. Apple can be supporting old hardware for very long time, much longer than any other manufacturer, and yet simulatiously be shit at making sure their hardware is actually repairable if it does break down. Luis Rossman had a very good series of videos on this, consider this for instance - a chip that controls USB-C charging used to be just a regular chip made by some chinese company, you could order them by yourself for like $0.10 each, a tray full of chips would cost you few dollars at most. So as he runs a repair business, and those chips fail relatively frequently for <reasons>, he could repair a dead macbook for like $50-100(practically charging just for his time to take the chip out and put a new one in). But Apple doesn't like that - so they went to that manufacturer and specifially asked for that chip to be modified, so that it only works with their machines, and asked that they are the only buyer of that chip. So now if your macbook dies because this chip failed, you cannot replace it with a new $0.10 chip - you need to buy a whole new $1000 motherboard from Apple.
This is not planned obsolescence - this is going out of your way to make the repairs harder. I can understand when certain decisions are made for engineering reasons(like say, having the ram soldered on), but this kind of thing when Apple goes to the manufacturer and asks for a version specific only to them so that no one else can buy it, ever - that's just anti-consumer, and I hope the hand of the law will come on them super hard due to this.
> There is a popular myth among the lazy-minded about this, but the fact is that Apple's hardware lasts a lot longer, and is intentionally supported for a lot longer, than competing hardware. This is true for Macs as well as iOS devices. If Apple is "planning" for anything, it's for their stuff to last a lot longer than others' stuff, not the opposite.
As someone who has bounced in and out of Apple products for ~10 years at a time (1985-1995 and 2005-2014), I have a couple of nits.
The last two Mac laptops I had (2009 plastic Macbook, Early 2011 MBP with known heat issues) - both can still run the latest version of Windows 10 adequately for what they are hardware-wise. Every "modern" (as in OSX capable) Mac I have had at some point lost support from the latest version of OSX (which means you lose the ability to upgrade some apps). In some cases, like the 2011 MBP, for seemingly no reason, as it is still a decent computer even now.
While I know a lot of people here like to change their computer every couple of years like it's nothing, I still like to use things I buy for as long as possible before recycling them.
In terms of "hardware lasts a lot longer", I generally agree with that statement, but there have been notable instances of bad designs combined with bad support (and I generally think Apple's support is a notch better than everyone else).
The most notable (in recent times) being the Early 2011 15" MBPs with overheating issues. That thing was a lemon that was poorly handled by Apple. There's still a good chance that I'd still be using a Mac right now had that experience not left a sour taste in my mouth. I've never had a laptop die on me in 20+ years of having laptops (my very first was a Powerbook 170, and I've had a pile of PC and Mac laptops since) outside of that early 2011 MBP, which lasted just over 3 years before it died. It died again after the recall service was performed on it, because they basically just replaced the logic board with the same board having the same design defect. (FWIW, someone else I know who bought the same model had the exact thing happen).
Well, too bad that modern front-end developers don't take this into account. I use a high-end laptop from 2015 (not apple) and it could work perfectly well for a few more years if not for 8gb ram. Nowadays a single electron app easily takes 500mb and web browser 4-5gb. Given the prices on RAM in retail I am really upset that I have to drop couple of grands just to have a bit an incremental upgrade and enough ram to browse goddamn web.