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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

I feel the upgradability issue is relatively minor. For some extra money, I can order one with 64 GB of DDR4 and 8 TB of flash. That's probably enough to carry me for five or so years. Quite frankly, my local storage needs topped out somewhere between 1 and 2 TB and have been there for the past five years. Whether 64 GB of RAM will be enough is the big question for me. Even if it weren't, there aren't many laptops available today that can go further than that.

Upgradability is good if you intend to make a lower initial investment and increase capacity at a later point. This laptop is not a toy and, if you are buying one, it's reasonable to expect a return on your investment.

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Some extra money? You’re talking about a nearly $6k configuration.

It almost never makes sense to overbuy storage and memory, which tends to be a cyclical market that drops in cost over time. Doubly true with Apple that marks up both commodities dramatically.

64 GB will cost you $800. For $2200 you get the 8 TB. $6000 is the price of the full 8-core machine with each and every bell and whistle.

It's expensive, but not absurd. Think of it as paying $1000 a year for a computer.

Maybe in Silicon Valley with VC money.

Even then, it's getting more and more difficult to justify the increasing gap between Apple pricing and say - Dell or Lenovo. Almost $1k in it now for equivalently spec'd non-base MBP vs XPS15/X1 Extreme, and the gap just gets higher as you need higher requirements.

Let's have a look at what Apple have done since 2012.

1) Inflate the base prices of the machines and attempt to justify it via non-optional "features" such as the touch bar, wide gamut displays, extra thunderbolt ports, obsessively thin designs, T2 chip.

2) Solder everything, requiring customers to buy the specs they think they'll need in ~3 years' time upfront, when prices are at their highest. Look how expensive 1TB of flash was 3 years ago vs today, for example. Heck, in 2008-2012, several Apple machines could be upgraded to beyond their original BTO capabilities thanks to technology advancements and firmware updates by Apple at the time.

3) Where they didn't solder storage in the 2012-2015 machines, they used several different proprietary form factors for blade card SSDs when standardised form factors have existed the whole time (mSATA, M.2 SATA/PCIe AHCI/NVMe).

4) Removed the ability for customers to restore machines to working state either in the field or in a timely manner, and pushing customers toward Apple service and AppleCare.

5) Literally glue in the one consumable item in the machine (battery) that is almost certainly going to fail before the usable lifespan of the machine, pushing the price of a battery service up dramatically, reducing the economical lifespan of the machines.

6) Reduce serviceability of other components likely to fail or get damaged over time such as the keyboard and trackpad by riveting, glueing, sandwiching etc to ensure older machines are uneconomical to repair as soon as they can be, pushing customers toward buying a new machine.

This is a company that is doing everything to take away your choice as a customer, trying to turn expensive computers into disposable appliances. Don't try to justify this crap - just say no.

All the above, combined with the design flaws almost every 2016+ MacBook has (butterfly keyboard, flexgate, staingate, display connector issues, T2 chip integration issues), the seriously declining quality of Apple's OSs, the removal of useful features (MagSafe!, sleep light, external battery status meter, IR remote, non-type C ports, SD reader), have me now in the position where I not only don't want to buy any of there new MacBooks, I'm actively encouraging others not to as well.

Me, a once huge Apple fan whose personal portable machines have been Apple almost exclusively since the 90s. Whose OS of choice has been OS X/macOS since Jaguar. Who used to go out of his way to explain why Apple machines were worth it.

Nope. No more.

I recently bought a Thinkpad P1 Gen 2 with i9 9880H, 64GB RAM, 2x 2TB NVME, 15” OLED, basically all the options ticked, including a 3 year warranty with equivalent properties to AppleCare+.

It ran about $4700 before tax but after one of those coupons which Lenovo is constantly running and which knocks 10-30% off the MSRP of the device. Given Apple is now pricing NVME at $300/TB for upgrade, this seems comparably priced for what is largely the same internals.

I’ve been a MacBook Pro aficionado for the last decade. I’ve tried other stuff like the Surface Pro, never kept it.

I guess my point is there’s a myth that Apple is significantly more expensive than others, which doesn’t feel like it’s borne out by the manufacturer configurators when you’re dealing with high-end configurations?

Obviously, and this is highly subjective, I personally ascribe significant value to what Apple does to enhance thermal management (vs. the P1, which has throttling issues), to enhancing security through stuff like T2, Touch ID, FileVault 2 being so seamless, etc.

I’ve got enough nagging concerns about the maxed-out P1 Gen 2 that I’ve just ordered the new 16” MBP to do another compare and contrast — we’ll see how it goes. Extra 4TB of NVME over the P1 certainly doesn’t hurt.

Where I agree is some of the integration/packaging compromises impacting repairability are a pain, AppleCare+ is a subpar experience to Lenovo who’ll have parts and a technician appear next business day to fix your laptop. Also the mistakes Apple made around keyboards were deeply unfortunate, I had to get mine repaired multiple times.

64GB will cost you $800 now. When you need it, it may cost half that, or less. And Apple was notorious for underspec'ing the maximum amount of RAM a machine could take - it was common for a machine to take double the Apple official maximum because the DIMM densities increased with time. Since the integration of the memory controller into the CPU this is less of an issue, but the soldered RAM means you're limited to the amount that Apple is prepared to give you, which until this model has been far less than the CPU actually supports - the 15" i9 could be spec'd to 32GB, but the CPU could address 64GB.

Apple's attitude to upgrading is to replace the entire machine. It's both expensive and absurd. I bought a 2008 MBP back in uni in 2010. I later upgraded the RAM and disk when I could afford to, and when I had reached the limits of what it had. That machine served me well for 5 years. There's nothing else on the market today I'd trust to be a daily use machine for 5 years straight.

> Upgradability is good if you intend to make a lower initial investment and increase capacity at a later point. This laptop is not a toy and, if you are buying one, it's reasonable to expect a return on your investment.

Not clear on your meaning here. Are you saying that upgradability increases ROI, and that it is something one should expect in a professional laptop? If so, I agree.

Kind of yes.

You can buy an upgradable computer specced to your current needs today and adapt it to your future needs as needed. You will pay less now because it doesn't need to be able to run now the OS that'll be available in 5 years and you probably will pay less for the capacity by then. The cost is the time you'll need to invest to make those upgrades: sourcing the parts, assembly, etc.

Upgradability is, in general, a good thing. In the case of these laptops, you buy them to the specs you'll need at the end of the machine's useful life, at the full current price.

> In the case of these laptops, you buy them to the specs you'll need at the end of the machine's useful life, at the full current price.

OK, I see what you are saying. The nit I have to pick with that particular sort of reasoning is that now Apple has put their customers in a bit of a bind:

- either you buy the absolute max spec (and hope that it includes the specs you'll need for that time span), or

- you risk buyers remorse as you end up in a situation where the laptop that you already handed over a small fortune for isn't up to the task

This past year I recently considered buying one of Lenovo's premium Thinkpad T-series laptops, but the fact that they had one (of two) RAM slots soldered put me off. I was buying this laptop for personal use, and so I didn't want to spend top dollar on it right then, but I didn't want to end up in a situation where what I had settled for wasn't enough.

I ended up going for one of the "budget" E-series Thinkpads, because (paradoxically) those do have fully upgradable RAM.

The Thinkpad T490 (not the T490s) does have upgradeable RAM -- we settled on it for all our new developer machines. It's got an amazing keyboard and is fairly lightweight, but has every port you'd need, even VGA (and costs ~$1,000 for 8GB/256GB SSD).

It has one stick of upgradable RAM - better than nothing, but I wanted both sticks. Honestly, for a work laptop where you are going to be trading it out again in 3 years, that's probably fine.

My E495 currently has 8GB (2x4GB for better iGPU performance) and that's all I need for personal uses for now. But I can upgrade to 32GB later if I need to (and for less overall cost).

It's not just buyers remorse. If you use the machine for work and buy something under-spec'd - especially in RAM, you lose money by being less efficient with a slower machine.

Upgradability also lowers the total cost of ownership, as the upgraded parts become cheaper by the time you need them.

By how much? I understand that if instead of buying a laptop with the intention of replacing it with the then top-of-the-line model five years down the road I get one that I plan to outgrow in 2 years, I'll spend less money, but is that a relevant amount compared to the money you expect to make by using the computer?

The question is less whether the cost is lower, but whether it's lower enough to justify the extra work of upgrading.

> whether it's lower enough to justify the extra work of upgrading.

Extra work? I upgraded the SSD in my 2015 MBP in 2 hours. And almost all of that was waiting for time machine to restore to the new disk. Is that worth it against the £2k+ I'd have to spend on a whole new MacBook? Of course it is.

I couldn't have afforded the bigger disk when I first purchased the laptop (if you have the ability to always be able to afford to top-of-the-line model, then that's a luxury that not everyone has). And this is Apple, who claim to be environmentally friendly.

Not everyone makes Bay Area money as an engineer especially in the hard sciences. Even though I’m one of the lucky ones, it’s annoying being forced to pay Apple prices for storage which is about double the market price eg Apple 8TB $2400 vs decent brand decent speed 8TB ~$1200-$1500. It is very hard to justify. This also doesn’t account for inflation and the general decrease in storage prices over time. Yes, the price drops are no longer as fast but in a year or two, we’re still seeing %25 price decreases; it’s still worth waiting for a lot of people including me. I feel the same way about Apple RAM. Soldering it down does nothing for me. it just helps Apple’s profits, since it seems they’re no longer able to substantially grow their user base. It feels like extortion and this isn’t helping growth long term even if they only see iOS as the future

But isn’t this exactly the point of the thunderbolt ports? You can buy your external SSDs and get as fast (even faster if you RAID them) access to your data.

It's also hard to imagine needing 8TB on-the-go capacity. That's certainly a niche use. I can imagine more cases where being tethered to a desk in order to get to the data would be not a big deal.

And there are always networked storage servers.

To paraphrase a recent HN comment about the touchbar...

     "I'm so glad this model has soldered storage"

     "I would buy a dell xps but only if it had soldered storage"

     things no one ever said. [1]

Soldering ram and storage on a laptop this big is an anti-feature, just a remnant of what Marco calls the "spiteful design" [2] of the last three generations. When a DIY upgrade to 128gb/16tb is affordable not a single person will be thankful they can't upgrade.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21524004

[2] https://marco.org/2019/11/13/mbp16

The point is I don't care. I'd rather have the specs of what I'll need five years from now right now and have a very comfortable machine than having a reasonable machine now, spending a day upgrading it later, having a then reasonable machine until it's retired.

The difference in cost is not that huge. I'm not talking about getting an 8-way Xeon Platinum box with 16 TB of RAM to put under my desk.

>have the specs of what I'll need five years from now right now

lol... like you can know this. My 2010 MBPro definitely needed 16GB ram in 2016, and thankfully I was able to put it in there even though apple never supported that much ram in that model.

Your entire perspective on this is entirely warped.

It's also worth considering that it extends the usable life of the machines. In some companies, older high end machines that are still in good condition are recycled and passed down to less demanding users - e.g. developer machines may get passed down to tech support.

For personal users, it means that passing it down to a family member may no longer be an option.

In addition, the lack of upgradability has tanked the resale value of lower end Macs - so lease companies aren't recovering as much value, and consumers machines are depreciating faster than Macs of old.

During the upgradability era, it was still cheaper to up your ram and storage yourself on day one than through apples gouging. You could even put in more ram than apple even offered.

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