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Well said, @blazerunner .

Tim Cook doesn't care about consumers. He cares about shareholders.

Soldered RAM and soldered SSDs are very anti-consumer.

Steve Jobs was a jerk to some of his family members, employees, and business associates, but at least he was pro-consumer. Under Jobs, Apple had some of the highest profit margins in the industry, which was not great for consumers, but at least the products he sold offered consumers a lot of value in terms of functionality. What makes Cook so awful is that raised those profit margins substantially while simultaneously offering consumers much less value in terms of functionality.
You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. None whatsoever.
 
I have no problem with them soldering RAM, heck if they can have the RAM as part of SOC, it would be amazing. I will take performance over upgradability for Laptops. If I want upgradability I will buy a workstation, like my AMD/Nvidia workstation. Best of both worlds, capable compact MBP and an upgradable workstation.
To me, true innovation with the M chip generation would have been for Apple to raise performance AS WELL AS maintain RAM and internal SSD upgradability for customers.
 
To me, true innovation with the M chip generation would have been for Apple to raise performance AS WELL AS maintain RAM and internal SSD upgradability for customers.
In a dream scenario yes, but can’t have both ways yet, RAM is already packaged for Unified Memory. Just hoping the Unified RAM can fit in to SOC or Apple increases the Cache. My AMD workstation with 4090 has 128 GB RAM, but it runs out of GPU memory, which is limited to 24 GB. My MBP with 64 GB unified memory doesn’t. Apple just need to keep improving the GPU and memory they can support. My next MBP upgrade will probably be M5, hoping RAM support of 256 GB.
 
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The famous MD101 and MD103. Still have mine, with the original box. $1200 new, stock hard drive and 4GB RAM. Did the SSD and RAM upgrades myself years later. Have mine multi-boot but tend to use Monterey a lot.

The mid 2012 Macbook is the only one ever that officially supported 9 versions of the operating system, and the final one with Firewire. My late 2008 is almost identical but has the Firewire deleted.
 
Still using the 15“ version with the HiRes matte display, which was the go to display in the pre retina era of MacBooks. Upgraded RAM and SSD, of course. Thanks to OCLP, it runs Sonoma (mostly) just fine :) what a great machine!
 
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Yet, I still have my waaaaay-obsolete Apple PowerBook G4 12".
In perfect working condition. Even the battery hasn't popped.

apple-powerbook-12.png

Durability at its finest.
 
Soldering the RAM to the motherboard after that was a giant middle finger to the consumer and force them to buy whole new laptops instead of a simple small upgrade. You just can't respect Apple for that... their 'environmentally friendly' claims are complete garbage.
Until this year, all laptops that feature LPDDR (low power) RAM had to have it soldered directly to the main board close to the processor - that was part of the speed and power saving, longer busses with plugs and sockets take more power. LPDDR was only available as surface-mount chips. Machines that took standard DIMM modules had to be larger and use more power,

Samsung have recently announced press-fit, user upgradeable LPDDR modules, so maybe we’ll see ultra-portable PC laptops with upgradeable RAM in 2024. Apple have gone an extra step and incorporated the RAM directly into the processor package to squeeze a bit more speed and efficiency out of it, so I doubt that they’ll adopt press-fit RAM.

Apples problem is that they’ve created artificial scarcity by skimping on the default RAM and charging a fortune for build-time upgrades - there’s no excuse for anything but the very cheapest M1 MacBook Air to come with as little as 8GB, or for charging $200 for a measly 8GB extra. You can cherry pick a few bad PC deals with similar prices but credible competitors like Dell XPS or Thinkpads costing over $1000 are increasingly coming with 16GB or more and/or cheaper upgrades. Fix that and there’d be no reason to need an after~market upgrade.
 
2012 MBP 13" ended macOS Support with Catalina 18 months ago on July 20, 2022.

I'd replace it with

- 2022 MBA 13" M2 released Jun 2022
- 2023 MBP 14" M3 released Oct 2023

Hoping Apple will consider CAMM2 replaceable memory module in the future.
 
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people think CDs are dead, but I see them used daily in health care. Or maybe the places are I go to are outdated.

That was the last truly upgradeable laptop. Soldering the RAM to the motherboard after that was a giant middle finger to the consumer and force them to buy whole new laptops instead of a simple small upgrade. You just can't respect Apple for that... their 'environmentally friendly' claims are complete garbage.

That said, pro-consumer policies don't concern Apple which is why they're now worth 3 trillion dollars... by ripping off consumers. Nice.

I have a gift for you: https://frame.work/

Same, though I bought my 2009 new. Kept it going for 8 years with a memory and SSD upgrade... It sounds crazy now to think about opening up any MacBook and "replacing parts..." :D

It still sits in the closet as the one non-gaming-console optical drive in the house, "just in case." What strikes me most about it, 3 MBAs and an rMBP later, is that 4.7 lbs is A LOT. Those original unibodies were tanks.

people used to think Apple was crazy to be obsessed with making things smaller and thinner.
 
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It's really kinda surprising, when you consider the power and speed increases over the last decade, and how we think of those increases as meaning exponential increases in performance. If you don't think too hard about it, it seems like one of these machines from 2012 must have been about as powerful as a wristwatch and should barely have been able to even run much less run anything intensive. And then you fire one up, and launch Logic, open some old project, and there it goes, doing the job just fine without a hiccup. And it's a practically worthless throwaway computer.

A big part of it seems to be that the farther back you go running older OSes, the more they couldn't afford to be so cavalier consuming hardware resources with a million background services.

Oh, it's more than that. 2012 is roughly the point when computers became fast enough for most people. A 2012 MacBook Pro with a SSD and 16GB RAM (or, really, even 8GB RAM) is perfectly capable of running current macOS 14 and handling day to day use for most people.

It's not obsolete at all.

Sure, a 2023 MBP is a little faster. But it's not really all that noticeably faster doing most things that most people do day to day. I mean, I'm typing this on a 2015 MBP running macOS 14, and it's absolutely fine, it's my daily driver right now, I do almost everything on it, and I've got a 2012 MBP running 10.14 sitting right beside it that I still use pretty regularly when I need to run 32-bit apps that's almost as fast. I've touched brand new Macs, set them up for clients, and they're not that much faster than this 2015.

The power and speed increases over the last decade... haven't been that much. Compare a 2012 to a 2002, and you'll see a huge jump in capabilities, 2012 to 2022 looks nothing like that. And 1992 to 2002 - wow, that's a PowerBook 140 (I have one of those) to a TiBook G4 (got a few of those too) - the change is unreal.

Technology advances have slowed down. macOS releases have become change for the sake of change, not anything that really improves our lives, and in many cases making things worse. After all, did your life somehow get better when 32-bit app support was dropped? When PowerPC apps stopped working? When the UI went from "lickable" to flat and ugly? When scroll arrows disappeared? (Yeah, I still want my scroll arrows back.) When System Preferences became System Settings and everything moved around yet again?

The reality is that computers just aren't getting better any more. Every tiny incremental speed increase comes with software changes that make our lives just a little bit worse.
 
In a dream scenario yes, but can’t have both ways yet, RAM is already packaged for Unified Memory. Just hoping the Unified RAM can fit in to SOC or Apple increases the Cache. My AMD workstation with 4090 has 128 GB RAM, but it runs out of GPU memory, which is limited to 24 GB. My MBP with 64 GB unified memory doesn’t. Apple just need to keep improving the GPU and memory they can support. My next MBP upgrade will probably be M5, hoping RAM support of 256 GB.

"Unified memory" is idiotic. The tiny incremental speed gain is in no way worth the loss of being able to upgrade the RAM.
 
2012 MBP 13" ended macOS Support with Catalina 18 months ago on July 20, 2022.

I'd replace it with

- 2022 MBA 13" M2 released Jun 2022
- 2023 MBP 14" M3 released Oct 2023

Hoping Apple will consider CAMM2 replaceable memory module in the future.


It'll run Sonoma. Official OS support means less than nothing.
 
"Unified memory" is idiotic. The tiny incremental speed gain is in no way worth the loss of being able to upgrade the RAM.
May be for you it is idiotic, but for me having 128 GB RAM in a workstation and running out of memory with 24 GB GPU is stupid. I will take unified memory any day than spending on a GPU more than my MBP to get more than 24 GB. Apple isn’t going back on unified memory, that’s their big differentiator going forward with so much compute on GPU. If you need upgradability Apple isn’t the choice, though I have love hate experience with my AMD/Nvidia. I prefer upgradability in workstation. Pick what is important.
 
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It'll run Sonoma. Official OS support means less than nothing.
If you're a geek you can have a computer 2x its age keep running on the latest macOS or Windows.

But for over 19 of 20 Mac users it is time to give up the ghost by its 10th year.

I welcome the 1 of 20 Mac users to continue the fight to be right but leave us out of it.
 
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people think CDs are dead, but I see them used daily in health care. Or maybe the places are I go to are outdated.



I have a gift for you: https://frame.work/



people used to think Apple was crazy to be obsessed with making things smaller and thinner.

You are correct, CD/DVDs are still in use in healthcare for imaging. It's cheaper than giving away flash drives, and safer and more private than online delivery.
 
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people think CDs are dead, but I see them used daily in health care. Or maybe the places are I go to are outdated.
More likely your health care facility wants to enjoy the savings associated with obsolete & low-end hardware.

Is your org Windows or Mac-based? I still see cheapest laptops with optical drives.

If there is no legal reason to replace decade(s) old systems and is air gap from the public web then...
 
Best (so-far) computer that I ever owned. Used it as my main and only computer from 2012 to mid 2020.

We'll see if my M1 Air holds out that long. I hope so!
I went through four versions of this from 2009 until the last (mid 2012 version) that I bought in 2016 and used until summer 2023, finally replacing it with an M2 Pro. The ability to swap out the data drive and RAM were what made it worth keeping going with; plus it was basically bulletproof.

And the battery-life-indicator button with lights on the side were so useful. Why don‘t we have that anymore? I can think of no valid reason for its elimination.
 
I have a 2012 13" MacBook Pro that I originally used as my main desktop running Mac OS X which was connected to an external 30" monitor for many years. During this time I upgraded the memory to 16GB, replaced the included HD with a SSD, and replaced the battery when it started expanding ($33 for the battery). All of this I was able to do myself easily and the reason I specifically bought this version of the MacBook was because of its upgradability.

I eventually got a new desktop after a Mac OS X update started turning my external display off and on randomly and nothing I could do including reporting the OS bug or taking it to the Apple store for repair would fix the issue. It was not a hardware issue because I tried running Windows on it, and didn't have that issue at all. I was looking into buying a Mac Mini as a new desktop, but at that time the Intel NUC8 (Hades Canyon) offered so much more (including upgradability), which is what I decided to buy (I like Mini Systems) and still my main desktop till today.

I converted the role of the 2012 MacBook to being a server running Windows, and connected two 4-slot drive enclosures to each of the USB3 ports with HDDs for storage. The 2012 MacBook is powerful enough for the server role it fulfills. It has been running 24/7 for 5 years now, and never crashes nor complains. I have been so surprised how reliable this laptop has been and it has served several roles over the 10 years I have owned it, and will continue to do so. So I add to what everyone is saying, this is one of the best built Apple laptops built, with the added benefit of upgradability.
 
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