[weblacky]

A lot of people won't admit this but Apple's been doing this kind of stuff slowly for a very long time. I mean think about it when was the last truly upgradable desktop Mac? And that was the last hold out from the last true upgraded a laptop, meaning storage, memory, possibly CPU?

Steve Jobs was actually famous for arguing with Woz about giving users the option to even have a great deal of expandability! The original apples were so malleable and so modifiable because Woz pushed for that heavily. That's the community he came from and that's what he felt the product should do, provide a baseline for enthusiastic users to modify and enhance. Steve Jobs definitely saw this as a hindrance to sales and passed it off as causing user confusion.

Once Steve got rid of Woz and after he came back to Apple you noticed that upgrade ability went out the window. Thinking of the G3 iMac line (tangerine dream, etc) and the G3 cube . Introduction of USB peripherals and USB storage as well as FireWire and networking. They still had a few premium desktops that you could actually put expansion cards into and technically change the CPU configurations with approved upgrades or third-party cards. They did still have enough pushback to continue to have memory and hard drive upgrades when the Intel machines were released, but CPU upgrades were basically pushed out at that point.

Now that everything is SoC, it's actually a form of powerful embedded system. That got rid of all the other standard peripheral interfaces such as what you were considered to be a hard drive and what you would consider to be a memory module. I think given the pricing of current Apple portables this is just fine. For the past decade or more Apple PC hardware has gotten faster but the prices haven't actually risen! Think about that for a moment. Especially considering that our US dollar loses value all the time. They've managed to increase performance to give a similar to better product at the same price point for many years. How many companies are doing that?

Just because Apple started from the homebrew Computer community doesn't mean it wants to really trace its roots there. Jobs always consider it just a stepping stone to interact with the average consumer and simply tell them what the product could do and sell them that they wanted a product that could do these things.

Course they've always been the technically minded users in the Apple community but they don't make up the majority of paid customers. And you could see that Apple has been less and less interested in education grants and inroads into schools and they used to be in the 80s and 90s. These days how many Apple computers do you see in a high school or elementary school compared to 20 years ago?

The truth is is Steve Jobs always wanted to sell people an appliance that's called a computer. He put people in place before his death that were like-minded that understood that was the mission. They produce a good product but that's all it is ... a product, you're meant to buy another one assuming you had a good experience with the previous one. Similar to an automobile actually. There comes a point in upgrading or changing an automobile where you usually just get the new version of the same automobile or something similar from the company line.

The one thing that Apple has been consistent about since the introduction of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) on their product line, was to make certain computing tasks such as desktop publishing and surfing the Internet as well as the creation of media and certain music apps accessible to the average user with a lower barrier entry. So an easy to use computer for certain tasks that they had anticipated you would do on it. If you go off reservation things get bumpy, but if you do what they advertise you're supposed to do it's supposed to be a nice fluid workflow that works. That's what Steve Jobs always advertised in every event that he introduced a product on. It's easy to use and it's going to make your life better and more efficient and you'll love using it so you'll really want to have one. That's been the consistent message and you don't need a highly repairable system to achieve that message.