That’s the key. Produce a product customers find good value at your price so they buy it. Adding costs that will reduce your margin and don’t bring in more customers or let you raise prices is foolish.
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15-Inch MacBook Air With 256GB Storage Has Slower SSD Speeds Than Higher-Capacity Models
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“They had to save costs to give a low price machine”
Single nand 512 14/16 inch m2 pro has entered the chat starting at $1999
Single nand 512 14/16 inch m2 pro has entered the chat starting at $1999
I guess I'm thinking along the lines of a Mac buyer who may have a list of wants and/or requirements, but one of the "must haves" on the list is the 16" display.
I mean, I bought the M1 Max instead of the Pro because my view was, if I'm gonna pay this much already for an almost completely non-upgradable laptop? I'm probably wise to get one in a high-spec configuration, especially since I'm going to use it for years and don't want to feel like I missed out on something 1-2 years down the road because I didn't go with a better config.
Almost completely unupgradeable. Remove the almost. Your laptop remains in its as bought state for life.
it also isn’t really going to make it last longer as will get dropped by apple at the same time if has a pro or max SoC.
also if your worried that a pro SoC won’t last long enough then how would you believe a base Mx processor is going to last it’s lifetime and thus buy a 15” MBA with a base Mx processor.
You wouldn’t as already worried that an Mx Pro SoC isn’t going to last.
the original poster that I responded too was saying that was looking at buying a 15” MBA but didn’t because the 256gb ssd half the speed of the 512gb storage. So clearly happy with a base Mx SoC. Yet they bought a 16” MBP as wanted the larger screen and upgraded to a Max because they wanted a bigger screen.
you would have to expect someone to accept that all of a sudden gone from will a Pro SoC last to, happy with a base SoC.
I'm not really trying to make a big argument out of all of this. Frankly, I don't care why other people choose to buy whatever config of computer they buy. That's their business. I just know from 30 years working in I.T. that's it's almost always been true that people don't regret "buying too fast of a machine" or "more storage space than I ever needed". Even with iPhones, I've never met someone who was upset about having, say, 256GB of storage space in it and wanting to sell it to buy a model with only 64GB.
What usually happens is quite the opposite. People try to get away with spending as little as they can on the new computer or peripheral purchase. So they convince themselves they won't use or need more than what's in some "base" configuration that costs less. Then, a few months down the road or maybe even a year later? They're complaining about the limitations they're running up against that they could have avoided if they bought a better spec of hardware in the first place.
I think Apple knows this is human nature and counts on it to maximize its profits. They purposely sell pretty low-spec machines, yet the price to move up to 2x the RAM and 2x the drive storage and maybe an incrementally faster CPU is many hundreds of dollars. That translates to a lot of sales of "base model" machines that quickly get replaced with a second purchase of a better spec machine when users realize they need more. (That artificially high price difference keeps a lot of people tempted to under-spec a machine so they'll want another one soon.)
What I don't understand is the thinking or the logic of Apple, I am so confused, when Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to drop Motorola as the chip supplier/tech what what in favour of Intel, the new range would be called Mac this or that Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, iMac, you get the drift...
The first couple of generations of the macbook pro was designed so that you could upgrade, the hard drive, the ram, replace the battery, it was in a word modular... The macbook in plastic, for kids, was not modular, this was what you bought, it stayed in that configuration... That version of the mac did not stay long, was replaced by the air, and this was a great solution, 10/10 for that...
Where Apple went wrong, was to confuse the macbook pro with the macbook air, and come out with 2 devices that are functionally twins, and they should be siblings, same family, but one is way better, has the swap out SSD, RAM, battery, is more designed to be used in situations that demand more power, the air should be the "chromebook" and the pro the mac.. In that yes you buy the 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, and as you find the need, over a couple of years, you replace the 8GB RAM with 16GB or 32GB, the SSD from 128GB to 256, or 2x this or that...
This does 2 things, 1-increased income stream from the upgrade path, and 2nd, it allows potentially, the development of RAM and SSD that may not be done if no one is buying, I am sure that if it was possible to upgrade post purchase, many would...I would, I would have over the last 10 yrs spent a lot at the istore having my mac upgraded, no question, I did this with my first mac, bigger hard drive and more RAM.. I felt so happy doing it, I loved the idea, the pleasure of seeing my "numbers/stats" better than stock...
Post purchase robbed everyone of this, and really there was no reason for the ban on post purchase upgrade, if in the really early days of this century Apple had the ability to design for upgrading, what happened between 2006 and 2013 that Apple lost this knowledge?? Did the planet become less "clever"
The first couple of generations of the macbook pro was designed so that you could upgrade, the hard drive, the ram, replace the battery, it was in a word modular... The macbook in plastic, for kids, was not modular, this was what you bought, it stayed in that configuration... That version of the mac did not stay long, was replaced by the air, and this was a great solution, 10/10 for that...
Where Apple went wrong, was to confuse the macbook pro with the macbook air, and come out with 2 devices that are functionally twins, and they should be siblings, same family, but one is way better, has the swap out SSD, RAM, battery, is more designed to be used in situations that demand more power, the air should be the "chromebook" and the pro the mac.. In that yes you buy the 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, and as you find the need, over a couple of years, you replace the 8GB RAM with 16GB or 32GB, the SSD from 128GB to 256, or 2x this or that...
This does 2 things, 1-increased income stream from the upgrade path, and 2nd, it allows potentially, the development of RAM and SSD that may not be done if no one is buying, I am sure that if it was possible to upgrade post purchase, many would...I would, I would have over the last 10 yrs spent a lot at the istore having my mac upgraded, no question, I did this with my first mac, bigger hard drive and more RAM.. I felt so happy doing it, I loved the idea, the pleasure of seeing my "numbers/stats" better than stock...
Post purchase robbed everyone of this, and really there was no reason for the ban on post purchase upgrade, if in the really early days of this century Apple had the ability to design for upgrading, what happened between 2006 and 2013 that Apple lost this knowledge?? Did the planet become less "clever"
They learned that from their iPhone iPad side of the business that, if you "commoditize" a device so far it becomes a single-use, disposable household appliance, they get much more profit. Because people throw away almost perfectly good computers will just mean a sooner sale when they look for replacement. Then on the repair and servicing side, this also streamline their work and requires less skilled technicians, so less money spent to keep Macs serviced.
actually no, I kept my 2013 macbook pro, and late 2021 bought my 8GB RAM M1 macbook air, both are stock, and I would have spent plenty on upgrades had I been able to upgrade, no question, the OS defines what I can or cannot do, that is fair, but the hardware is still viable... My 2013 macbook pro would be so much better for a couple GB sticks of RAM installed... Pay the costs, yes please...
I understand the sentiment, I myself started using Macs since the G3 days, and my fav years of using Macs was during the Intel switch, the hardware was as versatile as you would on the PC side, while the design and software were at least one notch ahead, so the best of both worlds.
But the modern Apple is no longer that struggling computer maker 2 decades ago. Look at how they treat their Mac Pro release, it may as well have not existed, according to some old time Mac Pro users. They have diversified into a too big to fail juggernaut that just don't maintain the same focus any more. They got priorities and "strategic" directions elsewhere than making the "best computer".
I also upgraded a number of Macs, including the white unibody; adding ram and increasing drive space.
I suspect the changes are driven by consumer preference and technology improvements, not any grand plan to drive new machine purchases:
1. The technology did not support all in one surface mount designs profitably at a consumer scale.
2. Apple did not have the financial strength to invest in chip design to make all in ones possible.
3. Consumers showed they want thinner machines, and replaceable components limit that.
4. Current designs may be less costly to make than if they required assembling discrete parts and have fewer parts.
5. Apple can design the machine for better performance than if they had to use standard interfaces to things like SSDs.
We on MR are a small subset of Mac users and given are preferences are biased to assuming the general population of users exhibit the same behaviors. I also suspect if you looked at how long Apple owners keep machines you'd find the average lifespan distribution has changed much; and the percentage of users who actually upgraded their Macs was small back when it was easy.
IMHO, probably the biggest driver of upgrading is processor power doesn't support the newest OS or software at acceptable speeds, and the processor was never upgradable on the Mac.
I'd say it's a mix of both, but you're quite right. These are all things that factored in to cause the change to "non-expandable" computers.
Many years ago, you had a few companies experimenting with this for regular PC Windows laptops, so Apple wasn't even the first. Sony did this with the "Vaio" line quite a bit. I remember some of those notebooks being incredibly thin, light and sleek (also expensive). People loved them, until one needed servicing. Then they discovered you basically had to mail one back in to Sony for repair, which usually cost you the price of the entire logic board inside, since they weren't doing component/circuit level repairs on them.
It's gotten so the components are reliable enough now, you really don't see a lot of issues with "bad RAM modules" like you used to. That helped justify the idea of soldering on the memory chips. CPUs were always quite reliable (except for people overclocking them and installing them improperly on motherboard sockets and so on). So soldering them onto boards permanently really hasn't been a big issue either, for notebook PCs.
Microsoft went from their Surface and Surface Pro line of portables being totally non-upgradable to making them possible to do some service work on and upgrade specific parts of them. But they're also still using the standard Intel architecture unlike Apple, who combined the GPU, the RAM and the CPU into one thing with the M series chips.
