chairman212121

Hi. Freelance Apple support tech/salesman/consultant/independent advisor for the last 25 years. I know from vast experience that only a tiny minority of ‘professional’ or ‘amateur’ (not a derogatory term) user/owners will follow a reasonable/expected and profitable upgrade path. It just never quite happens. Endless talk... but closing the sale? Hardly ever. What happens is user/owners or owners will flog a machine until they can’t take it any more. The reasoning is ‘I have to get my monies worth’ but always from the initial purchase price. Never purchase plus upgrades across the years. My examples of how workers in an office can save, say, 150 hours a year or do ‘more’ - or both - always fall on deaf ears. In the end these 6 to 8 year old machines need 4 times the Ram and an SSD to really compensate for a bigger OS, giant applications and their memory requirements. Now here comes the science bit: even when I’ve flat out lied and pretended to offer the Ram and SSD for free, most user/owners in the end, decline. What happens in reality is that people have been lusting, fantasizing, dreaming of the latest or ‘ultimate’ Mac of their dreams, often for years. They will say they need more space, more speed, more memory, but the consumer in us takes over from the user and awards themselves a brand new Mac. Which crucially can be written off in various legal and not so legal ways at the end of a tax year. Add to that, most are in love with the brand and are loyal followers. So instead of spending around $,€,£400 in upgrades over several years, they sell the computer for way less than they paid and blow easily 3000 buying a new one. And Apple know this, and of course the marketing is geared towards encouraging poorly remunerated trade-ins which are called ‘upgrades’. In the end, only a few really money savvy and tech savvy users go the upgrade path. The rest, not unreasonably, feel they’ve earnt a new Mac, as well as financially written it off the old one. So they go for a shiny brand new machine often with all the extras to match such as USB 3, thunderbolt, HDMI gizmos that replace older, smaller, slower peripherals. Seen from this perspective (of human behavior) it’s not difficult for Apple to ditch upgradeability, sideline a minority of advanced users (to give them their correct name) and force them to upgrade at the time of purchase. Oh, and if you think this is going to bring Apple to its knees, check the share price going back 25 years.