But why is it called a "Pro" this type of use is exactly what late great Steve Jobs referred to:
the
MacBook Pro was originally touted as an accessible, repairable machine to
add memory, to add cards, to
add drives.” That’s part of what I love about
my MacBook Pro. I’ve
upgraded my RAM, and I even
replaced my optical drive with an 80GB SSD.
http://www.wired.com/2012/06/opinion-apple-retina-displa/amp/?client=safari
"Pro" is about as meaningless of a distinction as they come. Are we talking professional videographer? Graphic artist? Developer? Researcher? Wrestler? It's a marketing term at this point. Who cares? The machine either meets your professional needs or it doesn't.
The 2012 Air met my professional needs just fine—better than my 2010 Pro in fact. I think that article made it pretty clear exactly what happened: the Airs were super popular and a profit-driven corporation (crazy thought, I know) went where the money appeared to be.
Apple is a company that—and Steve Jobs was a guy who—would play up whatever is usable about their current product offering. As the article points out rather clearly, prior to the Unibody Pros, upgradability wasn't something Apple necessarily handled all that well. As the owner of a 12" Aluminum PowerBook, I can attest to this fact. They were horrible to repair. The pre-retina Unibody machines were great to work on but they were anything but par for the course in Apple's mobile lineup.
The market has moved on. If there is one thing I trust Apple to do it's go where the money is, period. That's where they're going to go. People who upgrade and repair are a small demographic. The industry is moving to more and more integrated devices. Apple is not alone in this. And historically, design and vision—for better and for worse—trump practicality at times. The Unibody machines happened to be a time where design and vision aligned nicely with easy to fix portables.
Anyway, you've parroted this quote enough times that I'm not gonna bother replying again.
As already stated not everyone has deep pockets so they go for the entry level SSD with a view to updrade the SSD when funds improve and need for more storage increases.
And as I have stated on multiple occasions, I don't care. The number of people replacing the internal SSDs on their machines is small enough. Cross that with penny-pinchers buying Apple hardware and you have a group almost as small as the remote researchers that are bummed about this. Apple does not care because this is a monetarily irrelevant group of people. They haven't tried to actively appeal to this crowd basically ever. Their answer to the netbook craze was a $999 laptop.
Not everyone has deep pockets, I get it. Don't buy tools you can't afford. Don't buy tools that don't meet your needs. I really don't understand this argument at all. BMW doesn't make a budget compact nor do they want to.
On the flip side, unlike my PCs, my Macs hold their value WAY better when I sell off my old machines offsetting a lot of the pain of upgrades anyway.
I think you'll will find the SSD sales esp. Samsung on amazon is extremely active as have spinning hard drive replacements in years gone by.
Folks like this easy upgrade and expect it on a "Pro" machine.
A lot of people are in for a shock in the future.
So what? If Apple cared about this they'd go for it. They don't. They don't care about gamers. They don't sell a consumer-grade user serviceable desktop. There are huge untapped markets they do not care about.
You want "Pro" to mean "user-serviceable" and "upgradable." It doesn't. It hasn't in the Apple world since the shift to rMBP and the trash can Pro. If there was a huge backlash among the user base, and not just a vocal minority, it would show in their sales figures and they would adjust. Given that they opted for lighter/thinner/more integrated after testing the waters in the "Pro" market for four years with this design, it's pretty clear they have some idea of what the vast majority of their user base is interested in.
Do I necessarily agree with this or like it? Doesn't matter. I was happy with my Air, rMBP, and TB MBP. When I need more machine, I buy new and sell old and moving old Mac hardware at a decent price is really, really easy to do.
Folks like this easy upgrade and expect it on a "Pro" machine.
A lot of people are in for a shock in the future.
Apparently not enough of them.
Still no word on a possitive reason to solder the SSD except it wont dislodge if machine dropped! and the ridiculous 'thinness' argument
Why is everyone so silent over this?
I don't know why they solder it to the board. I also don't actually care. I haven't upgraded the internals of any of my machines since they came standard with SSDs.
The fact that they chose to do so in one model but not the other implies there was some kind of technical reason. The fact that they went to the trouble of building a special device for data extraction implies there was a technical reason.
I think the people upgrading their own Macs have a really inflated idea of their numbers. Not only are they small enough that Apple doesn't bother appealing directly to them, but they're also small enough that Apple wouldn't have an interest in sabotaging them at the cost of increasing the expense and difficulty of their own repair shops.