> The difference is that you can buy the upgraded parts from a third party. This has always been difficult with Apple.
Not "always". This is an artifact of the MacBook Air modern "appliance" era of Apple (and laptops / computing in general) where thin and light bodied laptops and compactness are the highest priorities, prized above self-service, upgradability, etc.
PowerBooks, by contrast, were amazingly and easily upgradable. You didn't even have to open up the case to do a memory upgrade — the keyboard just popped right up.
Two decades ago, the Framework laptop would have never needed to exist. And for the most part, likewise with Hackintoshes.
Sure, that's a story from 1983 but it is in direct conflict with facts. I have owned several powerbooks, macbooks, and macbook pros and up until fairly recently they were all upgradeable with respect to RAM and drives.
I don't think the linked discussion about the earliest Macs in the early '80s not having extra peripheral slots is saying the same thing as consumers being able to upgrade memory and storage.
To the best of my knowledge / memory / experience, all of the Mac models introduced prior to the Air in 2008 had upgradable memory and storage.
Was it really bullshit? I dare say that if you look at home computing platforms available in the early 1980s, most had no first-party support for third-party memory upgrades.
Not "always". This is an artifact of the MacBook Air modern "appliance" era of Apple (and laptops / computing in general) where thin and light bodied laptops and compactness are the highest priorities, prized above self-service, upgradability, etc.
PowerBooks, by contrast, were amazingly and easily upgradable. You didn't even have to open up the case to do a memory upgrade — the keyboard just popped right up.
Two decades ago, the Framework laptop would have never needed to exist. And for the most part, likewise with Hackintoshes.