Hardly comparable. You can not actually own an Apple laptop. You buy some hardware that can not be used or repaired in any way Apple does not approve of... so it is not really yours.

Apple are not alone in moving towards closer integration.

I have a Dell XPS 13 Dev Edition 9370 and tried to replace the Killer brand wifi unit that’s about 80% reliable waking from sleep.

Turns out wifi is soldered in on that edition forward.

I think the same is true for RAM, although it came with 16Gb, which is the mac its processor supports.

Anyone else remember the days of socketed chips that would work themselves loose due to heat?

Putting everything into a single chip is a pain to upgrade but it does mean there’s less chance of things going wrong.

It also means when something inevitably does go wrong, you throw the entire thing away and get a new one. I do not consider this a reasonable or sustainable approach, particularly when out of warranty.

That’s true but if integration means that it’s very rare for anything to go wrong within the product’s lifetime that may not matter and in fact be a net win.

I’ve never had anything break on a laptop[1] I’ve owned regardless of brand since 2005.

I can’t be that atypical.

1. Apart from maybe the wifi on my XPS13 which I can just about live with by turning wifi on and off.

Meanwhile I have a stack of 6-7 old broken laptops that are unlikely to be repairable.

What's broken on them and are they made with discrete components vs highly integrated ones?

If they are made with discrete components and still can't be repaired then you'd loose nothing by going to a higher level of integration.

That's completely irrelevant to the question of whether it's a good value for the money.

I consider $6000 good value for a Raptor Engineering Talos II workstation because it is US made and you actually own every part of it down to the firmware and schematics.

Freedom is value.

You and the five others that buy one can keep buying them then. Most people don’t have $6k to spend on a computer.

Evil Apple, they don't approve of running Linux so... oh wait

Good luck with secure boot or disabling the ME on their closed firmware. It gets extra fun when internal modules or the battery get a firmware update that breaks or degrades Linux support again.

I have ported Linux to previous gen macbooks employers insisted I use and it was a mess to maintain.

Also consider your warranty void, so good luck with sanely priced repairs given only Apple can get parts or make repairs in most cases.

Those goalposts sure moved fast!

Really? That reply was as specific to your taunt as it gets.. who's the one moving goalposts here?

"You can't run anything on macs that Apple doesn't want" suddenly turns into "It's a mess to maintain", which is an entirely different thing from literally not being able to run something.