It’s exactly that. They made an “experiment” with the retina macbook pro, offering an absolute wonder of a computer with the caveat of soldered ram and storage. The pros outweighted the cons, and after all, the rationale was that you could not fit everything in such a thin package if it wasn’t soldered. And the non retina version was still offered if rmbp wasn’t your cup of tea.
Nowadays we get mac studios where you can’t expand officially the storage just because apple are… apple.
Why would you expect anything different?
I know that many people here have been clamouring for a modular Mac since forever, at a time when the only practical "prosumer" Mac offered by Apple was the iMac.
The problem, I realise, is that people here have not been entirely honest about why they want things done a certain way. It's clear that people here want more ram because they simply don't want to pay $200 for an extra 8gb of ram, yet perhaps to avoid looking like a cheapskate, they try to take the moral high ground of arguing that 8gb ram is a bad experience for Mac users and they are simply trying to look out for everyone's interests, where the reality is likely that they just want to save a little bit of money (nothing wrong, but nowhere as noble a picture as they are trying to paint).
It's always been about the money.
The issue with the iMac wasn't that it couldn't get meaningful work done, but that it was tied to an expensive display, and you couldn't really upgrade the innards (the iMac let you upgrade the ram but not the storage, while the iMac Pro sealed the ram inside as well). I know it's technically possible to open up the iMac, but it's a fairly time-consuming process which isn't feasible for everybody.
It's also clear why Apple didn't release a headless Mac prior to the Mac Studio. They have no interest in selling a Mac "shell" to people who are then going to buy the cheapest entry level model they can afford, and then just keep adding ram and storage for as long as they can and upgrade maybe like once every 10 years. There's just no money to be made from serving this market segment.
Then the Mac Pro came along, and I think Apple acknowledges that people getting one are going to hold on to it for a very long period of time to come, and so charge consumers an upfront cost in the form of a higher price tag.
Apple Silicon is what finally allowed Apple to release a headless Mac on their terms. It's power-efficient enough that Apple can shove it into a small form factor and not worry about heat-throttling issues. The ram and storage are soldered onto the motherboard, which means that users cannot get away with simply buying the base model and upgrading afterwards. If they want more specs, they have to pay Apple's upgrade pricing. At the same time, usb-c allows Apple to also release their own pricey studio display, to the point where a Mac Studio + Studio Display combination easily costs way more than what an Apple Silicon "iMac Pro" would have cost.
It's not cheap, and it's all part of the cost of ownership and the price of buying into the Apple ecosystem and accessing the benefits of Apple Silicon and macOS. Apple is not a very difficult company to figure out. They sell a unique user experience made possible using their control over hardware and software, and they are not shy in charging what they believe the market will bear.
In contrast, it's the Windows OEMs who can't afford to do this because they are essentially selling the same filling as everybody else, and so they can only compete on price and specs. Sure, you may get more ram for your money, but it's still an intel processor under the hood, and it's still running Windows, and it's still probably sporting a subpar trackpad.
Pick your poison. 😈
