The entire point was that the retina models increased the entry level price by $400 above inflation. Thus, comparing entry level retina models to other entry level retina models is entirely pointless.
Caps off a bad faith argument with snark.
What a nice guy.
The example you used was the Mid-2012
non-Retina 15" MacBook Pro with a starting price of $1799. The model came standard with 4GB of DDR3 DRAM and a 500GB 2.5" HDD, not to mention it had no Retina display. The cost of upgrades back in 2012, either from Apple or from a third party easily propelled the $1799 15" MacBook Pro into the same cost structure as the Retina MacBook Pro offered by default. You can make the argument that the cost could be deferred as upgrading both the DRAM and the storage were possible, but that forced a conscious decision on the user's part to forgo the Retina display and the thinner chassis. I have owned both the Late 2011 non-Retina 15" and the Mid 2012 Retina 15" and the tradeoffs clearly favor the Retina MacBook Pro. The screen alone makes the non-Retina a non-starter.
There is no non-Retina analogue in Apple's lineup today and as the mid-2012 was the last non-Retina 15" MacBook Pro, the reality is that Apple's customers have had 7 years to become accustomed to the pricing that Apple introduced in 2012. After adjusting for inflation, the current pricing is still lower by $200 USD when comparing the same configuration of Core i7/16GB DRAM/256GB SSD/dGPU from 2012 and 2016.
The more valid complaint about the cost of the current generation Retina 15" MacBook Pro is that Apple chose not to offer a version without a dGPU as it did with the $1999 Iris Pro 5200-based entry level model from Late 2013-Mid 2015. Given Intel's lack of progress on iGPU innovation and no Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake 45w TDP CPUs containing an Iris Pro solution, Apple could have offered a $1999 version for the 2016 (Core i7-6770HQ w/Iris Pro 580) only to have to remove it from the lineup in 2017 and have the price increase happen mid-model cycle, which would have been a horrendous look for the company, worse than just keeping it off the market in the first place and introducing the current generation MacBook Pros at the current prices.
Perhaps Apple can offer a 15" MacBook Pro without a dGPU once Intel releases Sunny Cove-based CPUs w/Gen 11 iGPUs. Or they will decide to offer a 15" MacBook Air with a 15w U-Series CPU (i5-8265U, i7-8565U) as many on these forums have wished for a few years now. There is certainly a demand for a larger version of the Air, which would be a new form factor for Apple, allow them to leave the TouchBar to the high end, but still incorporate Touch ID. On the Windows side, the 8265U and 8565U are the Go To for PC OEMs. I think this is a missed opportunity for Apple, but that is my opinion alone.
Surely, you are not advocating that Apple should still be selling a non-Retina 15" MacBook Pro for $1799 in 2019?
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That was sarcastic, as apparently some people is ok to pay as much as the price of a full featured MBP just for a 4TB upgrade. I do believe a mac is far more valuable than an other PC, no matter if 1000 or more the price difference, but I also believe the upgrade price for storage is simply Apple telling you: "You are an idiot, and you are going to pay me an arbitrary amount of money to me, because you are an idiot and I can sell you anything".
There is simply no way you can justify $2800 (discounted) on a 4TB storage upgrade today. It's Apple tax. More so because they just cut prices unrelated to price per GB. Or they would cut all prices for storage more or less proportionally.
Now here it comes this guy (the one with galaxy-wide broad views) who addresses as parochial smart people who are not idiots and won't just pay any price to apple, and can make the most out of regular sized disks instead. And I read his reasons and frankly they do not hold true that much. There are lots of options out there to do what you need without packing a laptop with s**t.
So the backup and space was clearly not the point. But if you feel good at paying that much for an hard drive you'll probably find a personal cloud a bare necessity for backups.
Based on my informal research, a 4TB m.2 NVMe (22x120) does not currently exist for retail sale. Samsung does not have one in their portfolio, neither does Intel, both of which come to mind as the first suppliers likely to offer this in either the consumer or professional arena (NOT talking datacenter). By contrast, 4TB 2.5" SSDs are readily available. However, I am not seeing those readily offered in Windows-based laptops either. Generally, the top offering is a 2TB NVMe stick with room for a single 1TB to 2TB 2.5" HDD...or as I call it, spinning misery.
So, for $2800.00, Apple will install 4TB of NVMe-based NAND storage in the same space as the 256GB, 512GB, 1TB or 2TB storage tiers, which based on iFixit's teardown of the 2016 MacBook Pro means 4 raw NAND chips, two on either side of the board. -
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Touch+Bar+Teardown/73395
Those capacity NAND chips in that kind of density cannot be a cheap proposition in any way, shape or form. Right now Apple is the only company offering a laptop with that much onboard 100% NVMe storage. Accordingly, if you actually need that much storage (photography and video come to mind), the price may be worth it. Whether or not it is worth $2800 up-charge is debatable, but Apple is literally the only game in town for this kind of storage size and speed in a portable computer.
Also, no one who decides that this upgrade is justified in their own mind is an idiot. The cost is what it is and the purchaser decides they can either can bear it or they decide they can live without it. For those who opt to pay the price and it pays off for them in their business, only they need to be satisfied, no one else.