When they became less fashionable and calling yourself a "hacker" because you use social media became fashionable.

As a non-social-media using "hacker" (HN is the closest thing to social media that I use), I think portability in laptops should be picked over ease in hardware replacement (if you're often needing to change hardware, that's a quality problem). Recessed screw holes and bulk are a departure from that and feel like stepping into the past after using a macbook.

Similarly, I spend far more type writing software than with the soldering iron.

The screws are accessible on my MBP 2015. They are just not in recessed screw holes, and are flush with the body of the laptop.

Ya, I'm really not sure what they're on about. I took parted-out a Macbook Air, and it was the easiest laptop I've ever disassembled. Having everything built for the specs of one manufacturer means a lot less 'glue' to make it all one piece.

It's possible to have screws to access case-internal hardware without a laptop being bulky and hard to look at.

I'm also hungry for a macbook pro alternative (after Apple's courageous decision to remove function keys and magsafe and not meaningfully improve hardware), but I've yet to find something that isn't at best a flimsy clone -- I travel a lot and don't want to sacrifice look and feel for the 30 minutes every three years that I'd need to swap ram/hdd.

There were quite a few models where the RAM wasn't upgradable - I believe they were soldered directly to the main board. Is this the case for this revision? I can't tell!

Seriously, I used to be able to tell from product spec sheets, but Wikipedia also used to have model lists for each major product line with detailed specs. Wikipedia doesn't do this any more? Not even as part of Wikidata?