Actually that ship has sailed. The M1 MacBook Air was a big step up on any prior "user serviceable" Mac. It's portable, fast, extremely efficient, light-weight, robust and totally silent. Upgrading RAM has mostly been a non-issue. The Symbolics Genera emulator on the M1 runs roughly 80 times faster than my hardware Symbolics board in my Mac IIfx. That hardware was fragile and expensive. I'm much happier now, given that this stuff runs much better.
I love the power of Apple’s ARM Macs, and at work I always choose a Mac when given a choice between a PC running Windows. I love my work-issued MacBook Pro. However, for my personal equipment, it’s really difficult for me to stomach paying Apple’s inflated prices for RAM upgrades beyond their defaults (8GB won’t cut it for my workloads, and even 16GB sometimes feels cramped), and because the RAM is soldered, I have no choice but to either accept the default or to pay inflated prices for more RAM. Thus after 16 years of buying Macs for home use, I switched away from the Mac a few years ago; I have a Ryzen 9 build as my daily-driving desktop and a Framework 13 as my laptop. My Framework has 32GB of RAM and I can upgrade to 64GB at any time. I admit that I miss macOS at times, but WSL has dramatically improved the Windows experience for me.
I loved my 2006 MacBook. It was lightweight for the time, and it was remarkably easy to make RAM and storage upgrades. I also enjoyed my 2013 Mac Pro, which I purchased refurbished in 2017. While it didn’t have expansion slots, I did upgrade the RAM during the pandemic from 12GB to 64GB, which was wonderful!
Actually that ship has sailed. The M1 MacBook Air was a big step up on any prior "user serviceable" Mac. It's portable, fast, extremely efficient, light-weight, robust and totally silent. Upgrading RAM has mostly been a non-issue. The Symbolics Genera emulator on the M1 runs roughly 80 times faster than my hardware Symbolics board in my Mac IIfx. That hardware was fragile and expensive. I'm much happier now, given that this stuff runs much better.