[eduction]

If you're not willing to pay a 20% premium for upgradability/fixability, then you don't _really_ want it. And that's fine!

The Neo is an example of how this tradeoff should work: You lose flexibility but gain a lower price. For other Apple laptops, the price is on the high end and also you lose flexibility. This seeming contradiction is what helped open up the market opportunity for Framework.

(To complicate my argument a bit, it happens to be the case that the Neo is actually, for a Macbook, highly repairable, but the original article doesn't actually mention this so presumably they didn't think much about that. https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r... )

(Also, I'm not putting down the overall value of pricier Macbooks. You get other things in return for those prices, they are still a good value and I own some Macbooks, I'm just looking at the price <-> repairability axis here... The Neo is a particularly clear example of price vs repairability)

[Aurornis]

> If you're not willing to pay a 20% premium for upgradability/fixability, then you don't _really_ want it. And that's fine!

$799 versus $499 is a 60% premium.

The best case numbers are buying used RAM and SSD for the Framework like Jeff did in the article ($749 total, if you can find the RAM at those prices) and comparing against the non-EDU MacBook Neo at $599. That's still a 25% premium.

[eduction]

Original article: "The problem is, for an overall worse experience, are you willing to pay 20-40% more?"

[tracker1]

Now pretend you can't get the student discount and actually want the extended warranty/applecare and compare the final result.

Now pretend you want to bump up to 16gb of ram so you can run a VM.

[Aurornis]

> Now pretend you can't get the student discount

Okay it's $599 vs $799 now. 33% premium.

> and actually want the extended warranty/applecare

The Framework warranty is only 1 year, same as the MacBook Neo.

If you add AppleCare+ to the MacBook Neo you could get a 3-year warranty laptop for $739 that performs better than the $799 Framework 12

> Now pretend you want to bump up to 16gb of ram so you can run a VM.

I don't think the students shopping for a MacBook Neo are going to be heavy VM users on their little laptop, but if I do this on their website the price bumps to $1049

$1049 is within $50 of a MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and much better CPU, display, build quality, and battery life.

So I still don't see the value, sorry.

[tracker1]

But bumping to 16gb ram means buying new hardware, moving over your profile/configuration and then trying to sell your old hardware, losing money on the trade... vs just upgrading the ram.

I'm not saying don't buy a Neo... I'm just saying there are objective reasons why you might not want to... for me, it's that I would prefer to run a Linux distro on whatever I buy. I might just go for a Lenovo IdeaPad and save a little over the Framework and the Neo at that point... they aren't the only two options on the market.

[an0malous]

> If you're not willing to pay a 20% premium for upgradability/fixability, then you don't _really_ want it. And that's fine!

This is a completely sensible take, but many on this forum believe upgradability/fixability should be mandated by law in spite of posts like this where consumers choose against this option in spite of what the repairability activists say. It's likely that the EU will in fact pass some laws to mandate this because of this vocal minority and because it's popular to stand up to Big Tech.