> The moment that Apple started soldering parts into place, I started looking elsewhere because it was a signal of the thought process.

Very true! The first thing I did after buying a Mac Mini was to upgrade the RAM and change the HDD to an SSD, and even added an extra HDD. The Apple options for the same were nearly triple the cost. Only an idiot would believe that having soldered CPUs, soldered RAM and now soldered SSDs is a good thing. It is a good thing only for Apple, and Samsung et. al bottomlines.

And with ARM processors, you can be sure you'll get a PC with locked bootloaders that won't allow you to even install other operating systems. And the offered OS will also be a dumbed down system like ios that will only allow you install from a locked app store. All the while leeching off your personal data to the cloud.

I too have started exploring other alternatives.

On the flip side: does anyone still buy a low-specced machine and upgrade it mid-lifecycle? I've seen it less and less over the last 6 years and the last 2 years it hasn't happened in any work setting.

I know people like to have the feeling of control (do you really control your laptop if you can't replace your EC, CSME, AGESA, SSD FW, NIC FW, VBIOS) and the concept of shuffling parts around, but the need for that (at least in my circle) has pretty much faded.

Why wait for mid lifecycle? Buy a low-specced machine and the drop in larger storage and memory rather than paying a huge premium to the vendor. It's not about control as much as just saving money.

Mid-lifecycle because saving 10% on an expensive device isn't what most people are interested in when they are buying something to work on.

Yes, people exist that do that or want that or really need to save every cent possible, but to many others that is not even interesting as a thought exercise.

So I referred to mid-lifecycle because those people that initially don't try to go on the cheap usually only did any part swapping because the machine was good enough and swapping machines was too much of a hassle: upgrades made sense.

> On the flip side: does anyone still buy a low-specced machine and upgrade it mid-lifecycle?

I've upgraded hard drives and RAM on very single Mac I've ever owned, except the last Mac I purchased, a 2015 MBP, where it wasn't an option.

It's looking like this one will be literally the last Mac I purchase. Apple's practice of charging premium, bespoke prices for commodity hardware was insulting, but at least there was a reasonable workaround before they started the soldering crap. Soldering things down is just a brazen money grab.

Can't believe I'm looking at going back to Windows but here we are.

Same here. My 2012 MBP has been upgraded with more RAM and a SSD and the battery is replaceable (but it's lasted better than my work 2017 model and is healthier!) but the cost of the new devices is so astronomical it'll be the last one I buy. Since I will have to invest in a new ARM device just to develop for their new platform, it's goodbye Mac and back to Linux (already got Windows as a side Dev machine).

Apple is making it a pain to do even basic things like replace the battery, which is a consumable part.

I've personally upgraded the hard drive and replaced the battery twice on my old 2011 MacBook Pro.

I have done that on a 2009 as well, but that is a slow machine at this point. I don't think I've used it beyond 2014. I have a 2015 around that I still use and works perfectly fine, but so does the 2018 which is lighter. Neither need upgrades or changes to do they work they are doing.

I did upgrade someone's 2015 in 2018 with a bigger SSD because they needed 2TB and it wasn't available at that time (they were on 512) and they used it as a local buffer for footage before offloading. Because they only have USB3 or TB3 drives and no TB2 drives, the multiple transfers on that MBP are too time consuming to do in the field.

Why does it have to be low-spec? I bought my current laptop with 16GB of RAM in it (soldered to the mainboard, sadly) because that's the most the manufacturer offered at the time. If I had the option today, I'd open it up and swap out the modules for 32GB. (I think they now offer a 32GB model.)

Ditto for the storage; I have 512GB in there now (probably wasn't the max when I bought it, but seemed sufficient and was a good price trade off), but I wouldn't mind swapping it out for a 1TB part. Actually, this bit might be possible to do myself; I should look into it.

Apple usually has a large premium to upgrade the specs. If you can change your own memory or SSD you could save a considerable amount. But now they are soldering everything.

That is only something people take issue with because it used to be modular. You don't see people making the same argument with phones, printers, iPads, TVs, Cars, Smartwatches etc.

I'm not saying soldering things down is ideal, but it's only a problem because people perceive an option that was there but now isn't as 'bad faith' or 'taking away' something. Imagine the riots if we used to be able to change the CPU in a laptop. (in theory we 'used' to be able to but in practise that never worked well because the microcode didn't fit in the firmware and the cooling solution only takes a small amount of TDP variance - popping in a faster CPU meant it overheated so quickly it was useless)

Would it be cool if all devices were composable? Sure. Is it something users care about? Not really.

I'd like it if Apple found a way to allow swapping of components within the design envelope constraints they create d for themselves, but it also won't have an impact on what I'd buy.

> does anyone still buy a low-specced machine and upgrade it mid-lifecycle?

Yes, they do. Sometimes a technology like SSD itself gives a great boost in performance equivalent to a new costlier system.

I’ve certainly bumped up the RAM in the past.

No, this is not what I want, and I’m a power user. I want my machine to solve my problems and not get in my way when I am creating solutions. I do not want to be messing around with the internals, I have better things to do . I pay for it to just work in an environment I hope is vaguely private.

> I want my machine to solve my problems and not get in my way when I am creating solutions.

That's literally why I switched to Linux in 2018, after a decade on OS X.

Linux does not solve my problems (as a power user with Linux). It does not work with the proprietary tools I need to do my job and I’ve broken apt way too many times. I’m not remotely interested in debugging this at this stage of my life.

Proprietary tools, I get. But "breaking" linux is something I don't buy.

How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?"

I haven't used Linux as a main driver in a decade but I do use it very frequently and I am intrigued by all the many ways people online seem to be able to break it. I have never once run into a problem with apt.

It really makes me wonder how much time people who complain about Linux have really put into learning it. I'm not thinking you need to read a book on it, but after a few months of just using it I would think one would be reasonably proficient?

I understand the claims of needing proprietary software. I, too, with that the Office suite was a first class citizen. That said, it absolutely baffles me the amount of weird ways people have issues.

> How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?"

Raises hand my home server (running Debian) is currently in a weird state where a whole bunch of packages won't install or update because some library's stuck on a version they don't like. The version they want isn't available. I'm pretty sure I haven't even added any nonstandard repos to it (all it really runs is docker, so anything odd comes in as a docker container rather than a system package—this in part because I don't trust Linux package managers not to break my system when installing non-critical software due to long experience of same happening over and over, go figure). I'm not sure what I did to cause it and it's still running Docker fine so my incentive to spend an hour tracking down and fixing whatever-it-is has been zero—I'm just glad it's not a system I depend on for anything serious or need to really do anything with.

I spent a few years running Gentoo as my main machine in the 00s. On a laptop. Got suspend-to-disk working, even. I had to manually install Grub on this same Debian home server when I built it last yer, in a chroot to my newly-installed system, because the installer kept failing to do it (my process to fix it was very ordinary and encountered no problems, AFAIK, so I still don't know why the Debian installer couldn't do it, I've never seen it fail quite that way before, but it did so repeatedly so I had to give up and open up the engine, as it were). So I'm not entirely clueless.

Nonetheless I don't really feel confident using a Linux desktop I can't snapshot for emergency rollbacks or rebuild in a few minutes from a script, because damned if weird problems don't crop up when you upgrade. Or don't upgrade. Or reboot, forgetting you'd installed (through the blessed package manager!) a new kernel and now it can't read your encrypted root anymore so is unbootable and now you get to spend some time figuring that out. And so on.

I feel no such anxiety on macOS. Not that that it never breaks, but it's rare enough I don't worry about it. FWIW I'm back on desktop Linux now due to Macs' insane prices, but I suspect I made a mistake and the time I've already lost would have made spending an extra $500 on a significantly worse-spec'd machine well worth it. It's a little here, a little there, but it adds up.

Fwiw, I actually manage my linux laptop with Ansible.

I can't tell you about all of the times, but I will tell you about one time it broke and why. I did a debian clean install. Then I added the Spotify repository. Then I apt-get spotify. The script hung and then apt got into this weird loop. I had to add exit 0 to a script to fix it. This isn't what i want to do. I have over 10 years experience with Linux. I've even done Linux from scratch. I learned it already, this is not the problem. The problem is that Linux doesn't have stability currently that satisfies my needs and life goals.

The last T series Thinkpad has soldered RAM. Granted it still has one non-soldered slot, but still. It feels like the world is closing for of us that value power and control.

As does most other high end laptops....

There’s a lot more options for high end laptops for Linux.

Apart from the Dell XPS13 what other options are comparable to the MacBook Pro?