Expensive Macs and ridiculous RAM and storage upgrade prices have been a staple of post NeXT acquisition Apple. Entry level Macs that are just not a good idea to buy, too.
During the mid 2010s the butterfly MacBooks were just not that great: too hot and slow, keyboards plagued by awful reliability issues, anemic port selection. Some of the worst post NeXT acquisition Macs Apple has ever released.
This is not to excuse any of this, it‘s just that historically speaking we are actually still in an golden age for MacBooks (and, to a lesser extent, Macs in general).
To me the M1 MacBook Pro is the best laptop Apple has ever released (judging based on the respective contemporary context, so they aren’t just the best because they are faster) and the M3 MacBook Pros build on this. (Just if anyone is curious, to me second place is the 2008 unibody MacBook, third place is the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, fourth the 2010 MacBook Air.)
That these awesome machines could not heal the typical bullshit Apple always does with Macs (ridiculous upgrade pricing and bad entry models) sucks but isn’t exactly surprising.
This is post NeXT Apple doing their best work with portable Macs while still sucking in ways post NeXT Apple has always sucked. I vividly remember seeing exactly the same discussions about atrocious storage upgrade prices, entry models that suck and prices that are just too high from nearly every year since I have been following the stuff Apple releases (since 2001, 2002 or so).
As I said, this is not to excuse any of this, my goal ist to provide a historical perspective (and to argue for why this current behavior from Apple is no reason for doom and gloom).
Expensive Macs and ridiculous RAM and storage upgrade prices have been a staple of post NeXT acquisition Apple. Entry level Macs that are just not a good idea to buy, too.
During the mid 2010s the butterfly MacBooks were just not that great: too hot and slow, keyboards plagued by awful reliability issues, anemic port selection. Some of the worst post NeXT acquisition Macs Apple has ever released.
This is not to excuse any of this, it‘s just that historically speaking we are actually still in an golden age for MacBooks (and, to a lesser extent, Macs in general).
To me the M1 MacBook Pro is the best laptop Apple has ever released (judging based on the respective contemporary context, so they aren’t just the best because they are faster) and the M3 MacBook Pros build on this. (Just if anyone is curious, to me second place is the 2008 unibody MacBook, third place is the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, fourth the 2010 MacBook Air.)
That these awesome machines could not heal the typical bullshit Apple always does with Macs (ridiculous upgrade pricing and bad entry models) sucks but isn’t exactly surprising.
This is post NeXT Apple doing their best work with portable Macs while still sucking in ways post NeXT Apple has always sucked. I vividly remember seeing exactly the same discussions about atrocious storage upgrade prices, entry models that suck and prices that are just too high from nearly every year since I have been following the stuff Apple releases (since 2001, 2002 or so).
As I said, this is not to excuse any of this, my goal ist to provide a historical perspective (and to argue for why this current behavior from Apple is no reason for doom and gloom).