lol - the only reason the Apple II had slots is Woz threatened to quit if SJ won on excluding them.
The Original Mac wasn't designed to be opened by users. You had to have a LONG handle Torx screwdriver to open it. Job's was VERY much into appliance computing. Any expansion baked into any Mac was in spite of, not because of, Steve Jobs.
Many things I like/appreciate about the man - his obsession over all computers being sealed was NOT one of his more endearing characteristics. Obviously he was flexible - we had Mac's with slots back then and we do now too. But there has been no "regression" since his passing.
Hardly!
https://www.filfre.net/2014/02/macintosh/
> Jobs was a huge headache for Michael Scott, Mike Markkula, and the rest of Apple’s senior leadership, who received memos almost daily complaining about his temper, his dismissive attitude toward the Apple II platform that was the only thing supporting the company, and his refusal to listen to reason when one of his sacred precepts was threatened. Jobs’s headstrong authoritarianism had been a big contributor to the debacle that was the Apple III launch. (Traditional wisdom, as well as an earlier version of this article, would have it that Jobs’s insistence that the Apple III ship without a cooling fan led directly to the hardware problems that left Apple IIIs dying on buyers’ desks by the thousands. It does, however, appear that this version of events is at least questionable; see the comments section for more about that. Be that as it may, everyone involved would agree that Jobs did an already muddled project no favors.)
This is how apple has lost its way.
Apple should be more "modular". (and that would lead to what you want)
What people don't realize about steve jobs was that he was the great integrator. He got different folks to work together.
The mac pro from his era had pcie slots and worked with add-in cards from lots of vendors. You could add 4 hard disks.
Another way of looking at it is to read that silly book "The 7 habits of hightly effective people" from decades ago.
Basically said the arc of maturity is:
I think pple, under steve jobs, got to interdependent and was working in the ecosystem.After Steve Jobs, Apple regressed to independent. Instead of using its market power to foster the ecosystem, it has regressed to teenager level and just does what is good for itself. There are no other hardware manufacturers anymore and now their software developers don't feel like partners and tread carefully.
Thing is apple can probably do well for itself independently but... It's lonely at the top especially if you've turned your back on the rest of the ecosystem.