| Different tools for different purposes. In my experience, the laptops have not required opening for quite some time, speaking about my retina MBP and Air experiences. I could upgrade the storage (just 256GB seems small) but I don't really need to... I have all the music I want in the "cloud" (Spotify, Rdio, Pandora) and I keep my video on my home server on an external enclosure I can mount anytime through SSH or watch via Plex. I could upgrade the video card, but I never have before in a laptop; if I wanted to do things like that, I'd get a desktop. I could upgrade the memory, but I maxxed it out at 16GB anyway and it won't fit any more. I could open it to fix things, but there are few moving parts and nothing seems to break. I might someday need to replace the battery, but on both my rMBPs so far (one owned 1 year, one owned 6 months) the battery has not notably declined in capacity. Even at the end of its life, a reduced 4 hour battery life will be plenty sufficient, and when it finally kicks the bucket, I'm happy to have Apple service it. In my original 2008 aluminum macbook pro, I replaced the hard drive once, upgraded the memory, and replaced the battery; but none of these things are as relevant or limited as they were in 2009. I have no need for the equivalent upgrades anymore. The machine just works, exactly how I want it to. |