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but apple do have different options for different price points.

my MacBook air cost me 1k and for me that's enough in terms of what I'm willing to pay at this point and for me this works fine for my work and usage at home. I do get though that better professionals need this kind of MacBook Pro and they can justify the price. I'm sure many here are professionals who are buying this as they want and need the specs on this.
Keyword: ‘Desktop’
 
Design decision overturning practicality decisions, I would say...

Agreed. I'm just not sure if that is "incompetence" or "malice" though.

It's certainly customer-hostile.
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You’re not wrong. Dell doesn’t solder in the storage and manage to have a thin chassis but what can we do? Apple has decided to solder it for two reasons: they probably pay less for loose chips than NVDIMMs this the logic board is cheaper to make and they can make more profit from customers forced to buy storage at their prices.

Which makes the price gouging even more extreme.... but yes I agree.

There may be an argument that can be made that integrated components make for a more reliable machine (i.e. no loose RAM) but that’s secondary to the profit incentive. This design can also be more efficient in the case of the LPDDR3 RAM in the 13” and Air since LPDDR DIMMs aren’t available.

Maybe. But plenty of other high end PC vendors manage to put slots in their portables. I've been doing enterprise IT for 2 decades and can count on half of one hand the number of times slots or badly-seated memory have been an issue on a laptop. And we push out 400-500 machines a year at the moment.

That's less failures in 2 decades across several thousand machines than i have seen keyboard failures for my friends with 2015 Macbook 12"s or Macbook Pros 2016+. In 4 years. And i don't have THAT many friends with Macbooks.

What to do? Buy something else.
 
Which makes the price gouging even more extreme.... but yes I agree.
You think Apples products and upgrades are overpriced. People have been complaining about that for at least 35 years.

Sure, they’re expensive. But that’s different from overpriced or gouging, isn’t it?

PS You do realize that if Apple had upgradable RAM/SSD—or if they were cheaper, for that matter—that the base price would simply increase, right?

Apple needs a certain margin in the aggregate for any given model, taking into account the mix of all the various configs customers actually order. The higher priced configs and expensive upgrades subsidize (buy down) the prices of the entry level/lower-priced configs.
 
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You think Apples products and upgrades are overpriced. People have been complaining about that for at least 35 years.

Sure, they’re expensive. But that’s different from overpriced or gouging, isn’t it?

PS You do realize that if Apple had upgradable RAM/SSD—or if they were cheaper, for that matter—that the base price would simply increase, right?

Apple needs a certain margin in the aggregate for any given model, taking into account the mix of all the various configs customers actually order. The higher priced configs and expensive upgrades subsidize (buy down) the prices of the entry level/lower-priced configs.

Mate, i think you need to stop crying poor for Apple, they have literally more money than they know what to do with in the bank. I'm not even joking, Steve Jobs even asked Warren Buffet what to do with all the money they have in the bank - because he didn't know what to do with it.

I agree, a price premium is necessary for R&D, etc. But not to the level we see. And not for brain damage "R&D" like the touch-bar, the butterfly keyboard, etc.

2006 - 2015 or so Apple's products were fairly priced. Not any more.

Where's all this fabled R&D money going on the Mac side? $1000 monitor stands? Keyboards that don't work? All the new stuff is in the iOS devices, and they can fund the R&D with the profits from that division quite easily.
 
Mate, i think you need to stop crying poor for Apple, they have literally more money than they know what to do with in the bank. I'm not even joking, Steve Jobs even asked Warren Buffet what to do with all the money they have in the bank - because he didn't know what to do with it.

I agree, a price premium is necessary for R&D, etc. But not to the level we see. And not for brain damage "R&D" like the touch-bar, the butterfly keyboard, etc.

2006 - 2015 or so Apple's products were fairly priced. Not any more.

Where's all this fabled R&D money going on the Mac side? $1000 monitor stands? Keyboards that don't work? All the new stuff is in the iOS devices, and they can fund the R&D with the profits from that division quite easily.
I’m not crying poor for Apple, I’m telling you why their prices are high—because expenses are high. (They’ve got a lot of free cash flow because they have a ton of revenue at a good profit margin. And yes, it’s grown into quite the pile!)

Apple has a net profit of about 21%. Fine, let’s say that’s “too high”. What do you think they should be permitted to make, if we didn’t have a capitalist system that is?
 
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