Bonus: now you have your data around even if your laptop breaks.
Once I learned to live with a 64GB macbook air, I realized that 90% of the data I was keeping around was not useful.
It's very liberating.
Yes, I realize 64GB of data is huge, but not for modern machines.
How does lugging around an extra piece of equipment that is inconvenient to handle equate to being less of a packrat? No. Inventing time-consuming and frustrating coping strategies just because newer tech is more limited than the old stuff? That's not a path I'm going to embark on. There is nothing liberating about it.
The restrictions Apple currently imposes on us do not exist because they believe we should throw away our data as a matter of Zen. They exist because SSDs have not caught up yet, though at some point they will.
> Bonus: now you have your data around even if your laptop breaks.
What does breakage even mean in this context? My laptop right now has an SSD for fast system things and an HDD for bulk data. If one of them breaks, the laptop will still be usable and I just put in a spare part. If the laptop is completely destroyed, chances are an external HDD in my backpack will also be.
It's not like carrying an external backup HDD is impossible just because my laptop has adequate onboard storage - it's obviously a false dichotomy.
> It's very liberating.
I absolutely get that shedding ballast is a liberating experience, but it pertains to physical things. I have gotten rid of many, many things in my life that didn't have any real value anymore - including almost all of my books, CDs, and DVDs. The books and CDs are still with me in digital form, which is kind of the point here (the DVDs are, too, but on my home server).
The neat thing about digital possessions is that they can scale very well without encumbering you.
They're responding to a different philosophy.
Take music: The main case is generally "I want to listen to music that I like" or "I want to listen to (specific) music from (artist)" of some sort. I have 150GB of music, but neither of those cases require most of it as most of it is only accessed very rarely. The music file storage can stay somewhere else, for occasional reference if I want to pull something esoteric from the collection. "Cloud" or an external drive are great for this.
Wash, rinse, repeat for photos, movies, old software, etc.
And when it "breaks", i.e. that single-point-of-failure HDD fails, as they do often catastrophically without warning, the files aren't lost. It's like keeping your will, the deed to your house, baby photos, etc. in the briefcase/backpack you carry around all day. Fine way to protect them until something happens to that briefcase.
It's liberating dropping 3 pounds from your shoulder, as well.
Sure, but that's not the same every day. I don't want to shuffle my music collection around constantly; I'd rather just have it, so if on a trip I'm reminded of $bandname and want to listen to an album, I don't have to futz with downloading it on hotel wifi. To me the cognitive overhead of manually operating some kind of caching scheme, where I purge rarely used files to the archive and then have to page-fault them back in again, is not worth it.
It's simply the philosophy that most of the stuff we keep with us on our TB hard drive laptops isn't actually stuff we need to keep with us.
Obviously Apple considers your philosophy to be an edge case to their intended business model and would rather not offer you moderately priced options to upgrade, which is certainly a shame.
Whilst I love the 10" form factor and the light weight of the Surface there are times where I need something obscure and rarely accessed, and don't have my drive with me. This is frustrating beyond description.
Also not sure about the data loss argument, as I back up regularly.
There's many options for providing yourself access to the desktop at home from a mobile location, at which point you can access those obscure files.
It does seem that the tablet isn't a great product vehicle at the moment for a Tb portable desktop.
>Bonus: now you have your data around even if your laptop breaks.
External drives are pretty unreliable. It's more probable the external drive will die before the laptops internal one.
Citation needed.
There's no reason for the external drive to "die before the laptops internal one".
Not only that: you can actually buy the very same drives that are in your laptop for external use if you like.
Nowadays the external drives of course contain 3.5" or 2.5" hard drives. But the inbuilt hard discs come with little or no warrenty, are "eco"-drives that are meant to be used only occasionally (not 24x7) and spin with only 5400 rpm.
Internal hard drives for personal/business (desktop, notebook) come with up to 4 or 5 years warrenty and spin with 7200 or 11000 rpm and have a better internal cache.
And that contrary to what you said, tons of personal/business laptops come with 5400 HDs. Not much quality HD on a €400 euro laptop or even some Apple models.
I am just slowly starting to consider getting another laptop in 2015, but the fact that the new line of MBP adhere to the soldered-on-and-force-obsolescence philosophy is really putting me off this purchase.
If I need to go on a trip where I won't have good internet, there's more than enough storage for a dozen movies or tv shows or whatever and hundreds of hours of music. I just load it up and delete it when I get back.
It sucks in some ways to set up, and it's a lot of work, but it really does payoff later. And having all my media self-hosted somewhere I can get to from my laptop, my desktop, the web, my phone, my tablet, and chromecast to my tv is actually better than lugging all that around.
A disadvantage of this approach is that unsynced folders are not in Time Machine backups.
Isn't the SSD soldered to the board now? Do the new models even have SATA connectors? Do normal drives even fit in that slim enclosure? I'm not even certain if the RAM is upgradeable anymore, are you sure about this?
* RAM is soldered to the board
It is, although of course the downside is sheer heft. Compared to the new models, that thing is a huge and heavy aluminum brick. But yeah, I can cope with that in exchange for the convenience of more storage and upgradeability.
> What kind of work do you do that would cause it to break?
I'm just carrying it with me 24x7, basically. This laptop has seen the world, and it shows.
> It's like owning a vintage car. Everybody will be envious.
Doubtful but it's an interesting take ;)
Perhaps it's time to declutter your digital life?
I have an ancient 2011 15" MBP, which was also the last user-upgradeable Apple laptop ever, but I remain hesitant to buy a new model. There is just not enough storage in the new ones, or in models that come close to my old one (1TB+) it's prohibitively expensive.
At some point soon, my old MBP will probably disintegrate or get stolen, and it has features I'm not going to get back. I'm used to having my music, my ebooks, my documents, my photos, and my code with me at all times. It's really convenient.