- Consumers have aptly demonstrated that they prefer low weight and thinness over expandability and replaceability. That's one of many reasonable explanations that do not assume bad faith.
- While repairs have gotten more difficult, reliability has increased at an even faster pace. Notebook components have failure rate far lower than a decade ago. The largest single change was the transition from mechanical, failure-prone HDDs to SSDs. The second largest change were improvements to batteries: these have an expected useable lifetime of 5 years+, whereas in the past it was maybe two years, and only you took specific care such as regular draining.
- Material science and manufacturing have also improved, allowing tighter specification: If your washing machine survives two decades that is a major failure of engineering.
That's because over-provisioning is wasteful, and ecologically harmful. Even in cases grow fond of such old machines, it is actually better to have them fail at some point, because improvements in power consumption more than compensate for shorter lifecycles.
What I'm trying to say, is that people bitch about the Apple, but there many other horrible brands (models) out there. But there is not enough buyers to point that out as loud as in Apple case.
However the butterfly keyboard scares me a bit. They say it has been fixed, but personally don't have any feedback from Macbook Pro users and also this Air keyboard can be bit different.