Apple has put a huge amount of real effort into direct outreach and support of their customers, really.
Microsoft chased business.
Apple chased people.
Google is chasing its own tail.
For the markup over the retail price of the SSD, someone else does the installation, validation, built dumb stupid restore and backup services to boot.
Dell? Lenovo? Microsoft? Still ramming bloatware down your throat and persona non grata in malls or shopping centers, or wherever a digital nomad might be roaming.
Apple built a hardware and software ecosystem for normies. Free from the Machiavellian incantations of pretentious experts with their opinions on memory layouts, how big their data is, when people just want to edit and backup files.
People think the markup is worth it to avoid IT people. Can’t say I blame them. Have you worked with the “professional” level IT crowd? Alpha bro sausage fest and foot fungus eaters.
That’s why people pay the markup.
I work at a network security company and a very small percentage fit your ignorant stereotype of them. Overall its the best group of people I have met in my entire life.
You run into way more "Alpha bro sausage fests" when you hang out with "normies".
Anyway, if you want to get into it... Microsoft dominated the consumer market in the 1990s. The same people you say who were not nerds and didn't care ... Didn't care to get an Apple machine either, they got whatever everybody else got, which were Wintel PCs. Most didn't care if something else had a nicer design or UI or was friendlier or more efficient. It was Win9x almost everywhere.
I think this negates your "Microsoft went after businesses" hypothesis somewhat. They had total domination everywhere, and maybe got a little lazy or complacent and the lead eroded, at the same time Apple got Jobs back and grew as a consumer brand due to iPod etc. But Microsoft is still a major force outside of techie circles.
Is it perhaps "annoying in theory" that I couldn't upgrade my Mac's hardware if I wanted to? I suppose so. But I'm never going to want to do that, so I don't experience any practical annoyance. I suspect my experience matches the overwhelming majority of Apple's customers and potential customers.
It seriously looks like finding an excuse.
In essence, I'd rather go with a company that will fix my hardware even if they charge me for it. Rather than a company (like HTC/Sony) where I have to wait many many weeks if at all and software upgrades cut off in under two years.
May as well but a new Dell every 2 years for half the price
I have a linux desktop that works well, but I can't always work on it unfortunately.
On the one hand, Apple loves to eliminate options and lock things down, both for quasi-defensible reasons like simplifying product lines and for less defensible ones like increasing profit margins (and making everything obsessively thinner, like they're in the grip of some industrial design anorexia). On the other, their most recent hardware design changes have often shown response to customer complaints (e.g., replacing the butterfly keyboard with an improved iteration of the "Magic" keyboard) -- and, if they really intended to lock down the Mac like iOS, the move to ARM and the sweeping UX changes in macOS Big Sur would almost certainly have been when that happened. The fact that it hadn't happened makes me considerably more skeptical it's going to. (I'm also more skeptical now that iOS will ever be allowed to blossom into a full general-purpose OS, but that's a different topic.)
As an aside, I'm not sure whether adding the T2 chip would make it more complicated to use a third-party SSD. It's my understanding they function as the SSD controller and do some kind of wonky things, but I am not taking the time to look that up and could be completely wrong. :)
I suspect the vast majority of people who pay for the upgrades are businesses or consultants where the Apple upgrade price is fairly negligible compared to cost of their professional time.
If you’re someone who didn’t want to pay the Apple premium before they took user upgrades away, it seems a little unlikely you’ll be happy to stomach them after. Rather you would just do without (of course there will be some who do upgrade, but I suspect they’re in the minority).
Yes exactly. The premium on my time has been gradually edging out in my priorities. I'd rather pay a little extra to have something already there than spend the same amount in my own time instead. It's a fair tradeoff. "But there's not much time involved, it's a ripoff," say many. But there is time involved for people who don't regularly upgrade computers. Figuring out what to buy, the best place to buy it, then the process of doing the upgrade yourself (if it's possible) is not a trivial amount of time unless you do this often enough.
Let's say you can upgrade a hard drive in 2 hours total, which is conservative -- the total time of researching what to buy, reading how to install it, ordering it, opening the package, putting in the drive, configuring the stuff you need to do, if necessary. Even at two hours, for my wage, that's about $200 of my time. I'd rather just spend the $200 or even a little more to not deal with it. And in reality, for me at least, it would take more than 2 hours of my time all-in anyway.
Last time I checked buying 32 GB of ram for the imac was about $175, apple took $850 to upgrade from the base 8 GB to 32 GB...
Replacing them wouldn't take many minutes.
(Or - you could buy 64 GB for $350 (something apple didn't even offer, I guess the uint32 would overflow)).
