lmac

Color me indifferent. I use a case.

Funny nobody is stealing Jony's butterfly keyboard design.

There are lots of elements to this question. Back before Apple had its own retail stores, Apple Authorized Service Providers used to sell and repair Macs using Apple trained technicians, using genuine Apple parts. While Apple has never been particularly good to those folks, they are now downright nasty, because they would prefer that you bring all Apple products in-house for repair. Profits all go back to Apple and control, something Apple has always cared deeply about, is maintained.

As Apple continues to miniaturize components, it gets harder to work on devices. Even as far back as the G4 cube, and the early iBooks, it was getting to the point that installing an Airport card, RAM, a hard drive, etc. increased the chance of breaking something. Often when separating a case, you could pull a wire out of its socket, or break a plastic clip if you weren't careful or didn't have the right tool. Products have gotten so small that now glue is used in many places where tiny screws used to suffice. This isn't just laziness; it's cheaper, and easier when you need to keep slimming down the product, but the trade-off is ease of repair.

Finally there are some cases where Apple would just prefer to lock you out of the box by adding security screws, glue, heat sensors and other proprietary components that make using off the shelf parts difficult or impossible, even though this is not a design problem because they used to allow it on machines whose form factor has barely changed (iMac, Mac Mini) in a decade. At least to some extent, this is just being done for profit. By preventing you from upgrading your RAM or SSD later, you are forced to pay more up front to Apple, at the expense of great upgrade vendors like OWC.

I think a good general rule should be that if the box is big enough to make it possible, end-users should be able to swap the RAM and SSD at minimum. This is a great place for a distinction between consumer grade and pro grade machines. Make the pro-grade machines bigger, heavier, thicker, but with more expansion options. Make the consumer grade machines cheaper, slimmer, less user serviceable, more disposable. I'd be ok with that.

I have serious concerns about the critical thinking skills of anyone who thinks Trump is being clever. There is no evidence in support of that.

The problem isn't that Apple is held to a higher standard when they occasionally screw up. It's that they won't admit it and fix it. We are now three generations into a keyboard that is worse than any competitor's keyboard on the cheapest laptops. The problem with Apple is that they are so damned smug, and that's fine when they've got the best product, but not when they produce a turd.