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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

> I'd love to see Apple make a system that supported upgradeable memory, SSDs, High capacity hard drives, graphics, and separate larger monitors

Apple does a pretty good job supporting the needs of most people, in a slim clean form factor, with the iMac. It supports memory upgrades, and external monitors. There is a small group that needs nearly every component to be upgradeable or swappable, and they offer the Mac Pro for that use case. I don't see a scenario where the cost/benefit of adding removable graphics cards to an iMac would make sense. I would like to see the hard drive accessible like the memory is.

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>> they offer the Mac Pro for that use case.

I'm not sure I buy this as an argument until the new Mac Pro is released.

Having said that, the Mac Pro is prohibitively expensive for a lot of people. I think a lot of people want something between a Mac Mini and a Mac Pro. Something that could be called Mac "Midi" that would allow for some commodity parts (ram, storage, gpu) to be used.

>> I don't see a scenario where the cost/benefit of adding removable graphics cards to an iMac would make sense.

In any case, this is probably a non-issue with TB3 and eGPUs.

I have one of the recent Mac Mini's and upgraded the RAM and hooked up an external eGPU that's working flawlessly. (But for an easy experience you're limited to AMD cards and apple approved enclosures...) For an apple product, it was quite user upgradable.

(Technically Apple says the RAM isn't user upgradable, but it's still relatively easy.)

The 21" does not support memory upgrades.

The Apple support document[1] makes it sound like it can be upgraded, just not by an end user. Is that what you meant?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191#note

If it were doing a good job of supporting the needs of most people one would question why 90% of people are using something else.

Upgradable/fixable everything is a feature of the $299 desktop machine you find at walmart or the $40 machine from goodwill. It doesn't start at $5000 that only 0.05% of planet earth can afford.

Edit: Holy shit it is much worse than I thought. The actual desktop option is basically a $700-$900 pc that starts out at 3-4K. It looks like they have ignored the mac pro for years but kept the humongous price.

If you actually want a capable machine you have to buy the imac pro option and if you actually select a fast processor its more like 8k for a machine wherein you could probably build an equivalent pc for 2.

The primary feature of a $299 desktop is the $299 price. That it is fixable and upgradeable is largely incidental. You are right though, I should have said Apple is supporting the needs of most people who value what Apple offers in a computer (OSX, physical form, etc). They aren’t going to boost their market share by adding swappanle graphics cards to the iMac or a j-mouse nub to the MacBook.

> You are right though, I should have said Apple is supporting the needs of most people who value what Apple offers in a computer (OSX, physical form, etc).

Veblen goods is more like it.

> They aren’t going to boost their market share by adding swappanle graphics cards to the iMac or a j-mouse nub to the MacBook.

Wanting to add/replace DIMMs or SSD HDs isn't asking much.

"and they offer the Mac Pro for that use case"

Which was never popular with users, never good value for money, never sold very many, and hasn't been seriously updated since 2013.

"I would like to see the hard drive accessible like the memory is."

Allow hard drive and RAM upgrades for iMacs and Mac Book Pros, would instantly make all the performance sensitive customers much happier.

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