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Comment by karpodiem | Hacker News Reader

Would it materially harm a company with a trillion dollar market cap to offer a version of this without the touchbar (thus yielding a lower price), so people can afford to upgrade the soldered memory and NVMe drive?

Would it also harm them to make a version that didn't have soldered memory/NVMe drive?

Ultimately, this is why I switched to a Dell Latitude. Being user hostile to basic memory/disk replacement doesn't fly with me when spending $1500+ on a machine.

And if replacing either breaks the crypto chain - I don't need a black box T2 chip, I'll do my own disk encryption.

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One way Apple has become a trillion dollar company is by minimizing skus. Options mean inventory, development and test costs etc... and can be sources of quality problems triggering warranty repairs or replacements. Doing few things allows one to streamline both product development and manufacturing.

Removing the touchbar has a material financial impact to Apple? We're talking about a CNC machine here, that's how they carve out the aluminum chassis. It would literally involve them carving out less aluminum from the block, because the touchbar would no longer be needed.

Quality problems? You mean like the over-engineered keyboard they've had issues with for three years?

Some decades longer design patterns are battle tested/aren't broken, yet Apple continually tries to break them - thinness to the extent that they now solder memory/disk to the board, putting out a keyboard design that isn't sufficiently tested, and all sorts of Catalina issues that people have documented online.

Minimizing SKUs was the Jobs way. I’d say Apple has since then taken very different approach. Just check the number of iPad and iPhone variants.

They have more variants then in the past, but when compared to competitors today they still offer a more simplified lineup.

During the Jobs era Apple had:

4 different types of iPods - Shuffle, Nano, Classic, Touch

3 iPhones: gen, gen-1, gen-2

3 laptops: Air, MacBook, Macbook Pro,

4 desktops: Mini, iMac, Mac Pro, XServe.

It was only the "Jobs way" when they were about to go bankrupt.

How many more would there have been without him?

Anyway, You listed 14 unique devices. In the late 90s Apple probably had that many Performas alone, never mind everything else.

I was responding to a post that said Apple didn’t have as many SKUs during the Jobd era.

Now Apple has

iPod - 1

Watch - 4

Laptops - 3

Desktops - 3

Phones - 6

iPads - 4 (I left off the iPad before)

20 SKUs. Before they had 15.

But, the iPhone was crippled during the Jobs era because iOS had no frameworks to have multiple screen sizes.

Except they still offered options, but without modularity, so you had more SKUs to track in your logistics - you still need to track the parts you solder down, except now instead of shipping a base system and being able to make a "CTO" version, or just let authorised resellers with authorised service points apply the right parts, you need to wait till a whole extra SKU gets moved through thousands of kilometers of logistic chain for your one tiny order.

Maybe the experience in USA with Apple Stores is different, but when forced to buy a Mac by work recently I had to deal with some ridiculous wait times just for asking for 32G ram.

It's so much better in the USA that I wait until I visit home to do anything Apple related, whether it's to order a new custom laptop or to send my laptop in for service.

For example, I needed my logic board + keyboard replaced and it landed on my doorstep 24 hours later.

Definitely a different experience everywhere else I've been when dealing with Apple whether it's Mexico City or Lisbon. Most places are even lucky to have an actual Apple Store rather than some sort of certified 3rd party with questionable liability.

>> For example, I needed my logic board + keyboard replaced and it landed on my doorstep 24 hours later.

You mean a new unit? I highly doubt the repair happened in 24 hours.

When I ordered a max spec MBP there was a 2 week lead time before it was shipped overnight directly from Shenzhen to our office in California.

My interpretation was that Apple does not build and hold inventory of every SKU, certain configurations are built at the time of purchase and it took 2 weeks for the factory to process our order.

> One way Apple has become a trillion dollar company is by minimizing skus.

One way. The other is, if your computer breaks you either upgrade or spend a lot to have it repaired by Apple. There's no downside in using non soldered down ram and storage, it's just the nth lock in strategy.

Storage is one thing and I agree it should be M.2 (though there are other complicating issues like compatibility with 3rd party SSDs), but RAM requirements for desktop / laptop PCs have largely held steady for the last decade (at 16 to 32GB). Sure there are specialized uses for more than that, but you're almost always better off executing those workloads in the cloud than on your laptop.

You mean like video editing / special effects? I really qeustion this is something that should be moved to cloud, as it's really easy to have several Terrabytes of source material one has to handle.

Apple's product line is "simple" for marketing reasons. It's easier for customers to understand what product is right for them, then funnel them into configuration option trees. While limiting SKUs is still good retail practice (especially if you primarily sell through indirect channels), the ability for customers to easily understand your product portfolio is what's really important.

I do agree that they have slipped in this area, though I think it's an inevitable consequence of being a trillion dollar company. Apple was only able to become a trillion dollar company because their marketing and operations were easier to manage, and companies in a market-leading position typically grow until the point their size overwhelms their ability to steer the ship.

The thing about that is they could minimize SKUs even more by providing socketed ram and storage. The permutations of that are much more numerous than adding a touch bar vs physical keys option.

>> The thing about that is they could minimize SKUs even more by providing socketed ram and storage.

Okay, but then they’d lose money by not selling their proprietary parts.

If they care at all about making the touchbar a thing then the best way to do that is make every mac developer get one on their daily-use laptop. I still think of it as a novelty more than a functional feature, but I don't think any third party apps would support it if it didn't come on every MBP.

Apparently RAM and SSD are no longer soldered.

https://twitter.com/axi0mX/status/1194621631856967688

Edit: Tweet deleted, info is most likely wrong.

That is speculation based off the wording they used in the description. He reached this conclusion because it said RAM/SSD were "not user accessible" and they used to say "built into the computer" - no one really knows the answer. I imagine they remain soldered.

One only needs to take a look at the press images to see that they remain soldered on - https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/mac/standard/A... for example, there's just no space for SODIMM's to fit.

Really annoying they continue to do this, especially given they charge excessive markup on memory upgrades (2x32GB DDR4 SODIMMS average $250-300, Apple charges you $800 for 64GB of memory).

> Really annoying they continue to do this, especially given they charge excessive markup on memory upgrades

This is exactly why they solder it on - so they can charge those prices. They've created a monopoly on hardware upgrades and repairs for their machines. This is why a lot of people refuse to buy Apple laptops these days.

You can't upgrade a MacBook Pro after it has been purchased so not sure what monopoly you think Apple has.

And the reason why they solder it is because it reduces the thickness of the laptops. Those clips/connectors don't come for free.

Those clips/connectors don't come for free, but the ability to price discriminate is obviously highly valuable to Apple.

They have a monopoly on repairs. And with other laptops, you can certainly upgrade at least the SSD independently. With Macs, you have to buy a whole new machine.

And that's on top of the amount you are already paying for the base 16GB, so in reality it is $800+the cost of the 16GB

I'm pretty sure at this point if they make a version without the touchbar, they'll market it as a premium feature and charge more. Now with 100% physical function keys!

"The best keyboard experience just got better."

Yep. This is why I made the linux switch and I'm a happy Dell customer because of it.

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