Well, to save precious local storage space of course. Apple's just being helpful here.
But seriously, sounds like a "good idea" gone wrong - "I know! Let's save the user some space by serving all their music from the cloud!" The moment that file deletion came up in the design, the option to opt-in should have been added. Unless someone at Apple did indeed intend lock-in ...
Which automatic update features, by the way? While I definitely don't like or defend such features, all the ones that I know about can be turned off—which gives a more useable result than having to turn off the whole computer! Maybe my Mac is silently doing some behind-the-scenes updating that I haven't noticed hitting my data, though.
(Windows 10 is the real pig here, though. Bye-bye, option to download only on request! Bye-bye, this month's data allowance before I realised that it was downloading what turned out to be a huge update! I did eventually discover how to designate a connection as 'metred', a nice feature that I wish Mac OS had.)
Yeah, storage that was made precious by apple by not supporting an SD card slot. Very "helpful".
I can totally see how this might have seemed like a good idea. Shame it's just... not.
I just checked the apple website and it seems you're right. 3 out of the 5 available Macbook pro variants have <= 256GB storage.
This is very much about a laptop rather than a phone. And yep, I'm also suffering from this. I've got a 2010 MacBook Air with 256GB storage. I'm down to 10GB free space and struggling to decide how to cope with the now 160GB Photos library.
This is an article about music in iTunes on a laptop. Apple sells laptops with SD card slots.
If that's really the rationale, I think they're either optimizing for a use case that I find personally very atypical, or they didn't do their research.
I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.”
“That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile . . .
Don't contribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by malice, especially when dealing with a massive company who hires quite intelligent individuals.
Lock-in was intended, and then some smart people found not just a way to sell it, but make it look more acceptable even if they were called out on it.