I think it's extremely overestimated by the technical crowd how many people would ever upgrade their RAM or SSD in their Macbook. I honestly doubt it's even in the single digit percentage points. The energy, engineering and material wasted on having connectors probably vastly outweighs the environmental savings by having that one tech person upgrade their RAM or SSD,
> "I think it's extremely overestimated by the technical crowd how many people would ever upgrade their RAM or SSD in their Macbook."
Back in the day when this was possible (iBooks, Powerbooks, early-model MacBooks), I'd say that a large percentage of Mac laptops eventually did get upgraded. I certainly upgraded 100% of the Macs I owned and also did many for friends and family. Some models made upgrades quite easy: the RAM slots, especially, were often accessible without special tools. It was common to buy the base model Mac with the fastest CPU, then install your own RAM modules and big HDD/SSD to save money. Swapping HDDs out for SSDs was also, of course, a huge performance upgrade for a while.
Even non-technical users who wouldn't upgrade their Macs on their own would often trade them in to dealers/resellers who would refurbish and upgrade them for resale.
I bought an M1 Max with a 2TB SSD, but I’m running up against the capacity and I want more storage. The computer is still plenty fast. Normally, I’d upgrade my computer and continue using it, but now I need to sell it and get a new one to get more storage. Not to mention the carbon cost of doing that, these things are $4000!
Further, when I buy a new one, I’m now incentivized to over-provision it based on my current needs by that same logic.
I used OWC parts to make a 16 TB m2 SSD array that connects over Thunderbolt. It's fast enough to edit 8K footage, just like the internal disk. Look for the 4-bay Thunderbolt enclosure on Amazon. I did add extra cooling (heatsinks on the modules, and a bigger fan).
I have one of those suckers, but the read/write performance is nowhere near the multi GB/s speeds of the NAND. Could be useful for archival, but it wasn’t great for blockchain indexing or running VMs.
USB4 can hit those speeds, but then you’re in dongle town.
Agreed, it's just minority of users trying to defer extra $2500 upfront, and also about managing RAM capacity arms race. There is no engineering reason a laptop has to be upgraded _later_ to e.g. 8way/192GB/6TB configuration.
That said, I do think upgradable laptops are important as a resistance force against constant upgrades and planned obsolescence; if you could hypothetically add 2x32GB DDR4-2100 to a decade old ThinkPad and run stolen Apple Intelligence LLM just fine, the humanity wouldn't need $5k worth of labor wasted on one laptop per person per year.
Completely custom chip? Best webcams? Extremely tidy internals. Insane audio. You can hate on apple for many reasons but that their hardware is top class and this will demand much more engineering cost is really clear.
Apple wants $1200 for a 4TB SSD. I'm sure a LOT of people would gladly pay $300 for a top-end SSD of the same size and pay someone to install it for $100 and still save $800 on the price of the machine.
The article is about the desktop iMac model. Regardless, I think many would upgrade because ssds are cheap... RAM would lead to customers getting another year or two out of their computer...
Its very easy to upgrade storage on any desktop machine - my Mac Mini has a couple external drives attached to it. In the case of an iMac, a little Velcro tape would even hide them behind the screen.
Just look at the latest iMac M4.
Going from 256GB SSD to 512GB costs 230€.
Going from 256GB to 1TB costs 460€. The smallest model isn't offered with 2TB (or more). The upgrade from 512GB to 2TB on the better model costs 690€
You're saying few people would buy the 256GB model and pop in a fast 2TB M.2 SSD for 103€ if they could?
