colinng

@Racerhomie3, you can just turn it off on your device (if you're in an abusive household). 

StrangeDays said:

dougd said:

Apple greed at work, they will charge 3x what other SSDs cost.

I really doubt that. Apple has shown time & again that their engineers lead with what they believe is the best solution for the product. The pundits and rumormongers just come up with their own invented reasons, which are conjecture only. 

Actually, Apple has been known to just take a standard connector, flip the pins to different locations, and charge you differently. AirPort cards were just PCMCIA cards with 2 pins swapped. They started cheaper than PCMCIA cards but eventually the cost of a PCMCIA card dropped but the AirPort card stayed the same. 

When it comes to flash storage, same thing. 

As proof, here is a simple adapter that turns a standard SSD into one that works in your MacBook Air or Pro. The adapter is tiny because it contains no logic converters - it just, **surprise** swaps the pins! 

https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-Adapter-Upgrade-2013-2016-2013-2015/dp/B07FYY3H5F/

To courageously innovate around that, in 2016 they soldered the flash straight on to the logic board - giving you no choice but to pre-buy all the storage you anxiously worried that you might need down the road - and they charged handsomely for it. 

Fanboys will say nobody upgrades. Pro users will say they upgrade if they can (that is why the new Mac Pro is the most upgradeable Mac ever - a course correction against the cylindrical Mac Pro). So who is right? Would MacBook Pro users buy less flash to start with, and buy more flash later (when it dropped in price) - if they could? 

A company doesn’t boast a 38% margin (while the rest of the industry struggles to get past single-digit margin) and higher ASP just because they were able to be 38% cost efficient when everyone else was only 9% cost efficient. It is very hard to be 400% better than your long-lived competitors. 

I’m not saying Apple is evil. They’re just doing business. They can compete any (legal) way they want to. 

What I am saying is, some of us have had enough of these shenanigans. And we have proof that is what these actions are - shenanigans. 

While I’m expressing my disappointment, “Apple pays every tax dollar it owes” is mindless drivel. Of course it does! Else they end up in jail! But “what it owes” isn’t some fair number arrived at that is mutually beneficial to the countries it operates in - it is a number arrived at where one country (Ireland) decides to be corrupt and set an artificially low tax rate in hopes of getting some revenue and shutting out other countries. 

tipoo said:

"secretly talking to each other, secretly doing things like adding memory chips to the hardware." 

I wonder what this part is about? Which product was Jobs trying to get out without memory? 

Folklore.org article Diagnostic Port:

Even though the diagnostic port was scuttled, it wasn't the last attempt at surreptitious hardware expandability. When the Mac digital board was redesigned for the last time in August 1982, the next generation of RAM chips was already on the horizon. The Mac used 16 64Kbit RAM chips, giving it 128K of memory. The next generation chip was 256Kbits, giving us 512K bytes instead, which made a huge difference.

Burrell was afraid the 128Kbyte Mac would seem inadequate soon after launch, and there were no slots for the user to add RAM. He realized that he could support 256Kbit RAM chips simply by routing a few extra lines on the PC board, allowing adventurous people who knew how to wield a soldering gun to replace their RAM chips with the newer generation. The extra lines would only cost pennies to add.

But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party. But this time Burrell prevailed, because the change was so minimal. He just left it in there and no one bothered to mention it to Steve, much to the eventual benefit of customers, who didn't have to buy a whole new Mac to expand their memory.

That is, comparing price matched hardware, the Apple hardware will ALWAYS lose.   

The Apple product can't win because:   A very big chunk of the price of an iOS or MacOS device is the cost of the operating system, ancillary software and Apple's ecosystem -- which I would guess is probably about a third of the total cost of the machine.  (Other hardware vendors buy a far cheaper OS and simply don't have an ecosystem to speak of).

I don’t agree. A few years back, the MacBook Air was $100 cheaper than the closest PC knockoff - an Asus Zen book. The MacBook Air had only 2 USB 3 ports compared to the 4 on the Zen book, but as I told my friend - you didn’t need 4. The trackpad really works. The Bluetooth really works - so no silly corded mouse or silly mouse dongle. 

But that was when Apple was making money like crazy even when trying to court PC switchers. 

Now they price things like they don’t care. 

Also, a good OS doesn’t have to be the most expensive - sometimes it’s actually the cheapest. The reason being if it is good - it will sell in volume, and it’s cost will be amortized over more units. If it is good, it is structured well and easy to maintain, so the cost of finding and fixing bugs is less. 

Example of a really good OS dominating and being the cheapest? In server environments: Linux. 

Yes, Linux is darn near unusable for common folk. But macOS is probably the largest Unix distribution on PCs. Surely they have enough users to amortize the cost? 

AppleInsider picked an aluminum unibody PC with a comparable display, so you can’t accuse the compared item of “cheaping out” on those major components. Yet the Razor gives much better performance in every test, and costs $400 less. And Razor isn’t a charity - they need to make profit to stay alive - probably more than Apple needs to.