I don’t truly have a problem with the classic Macintosh systems. They were, at least, serviceable. Laptops and phones with batteries glued in, the pursuit of thinness überalles, and software systems that are both constantly changing and neglecting the UNIX core of macOS… These things are not good. The complete integration of their system to one massive chip? This doesn't bother me as it is what yields such dramatic performance. However, Apple does lack imagination. It would be easy to add, at least, NVMe and SATA without severely sacrificing the performance of M1. Adding expansion via at least one PCIe slot in the Mac Studio vertically would have been easy. It would likewise have been simple to add one sidewise in the Mini. NVMe drives are small enough to fit in the thinnest of laptops, and making these machines easy to open and service would have been trivial (as Framework has proven). At this point, the non-serviceable nature of the Macintoshes and iTrinkets (and all of the other devices that follow the Apple’s lead) are becoming an environmental hazard. It’s super odd how people claim to care about the environment and then manufacture millions of tons of e-waste…
Maybe Steve Jobs seen his computers as an appliance like a stove or microwave where the Woz seen them as something to tinker with. However purposely making devices where you cannot repair them when they break is not cool. If they lease their hardware to you then if something happens to it they should be obligated to fix it and replace it when it's worn out since you are leasing the hardware. Like car companies lease vehicles today they should be on the hook to live up to their side. It just doesn't happen that way. IMHO you need to be very careful with the lease agreement. This may be good for some that want the shiny new device every 2 to 3 years but not for me. I want to be using the same hardware 10 or 15 years from now.
Jobs died 11 years ago, so though while I agree with you about Apple's current push for isolating the customer from ownership of their devices, I really can't fault Steve Jobs for the current Apple focus. For one thing, their stuff no longer "just works" - faulty keyboards, ghost displays, portless laptops with poor ventilation resulting in throttling, phones with no headphone jacks, etc., etc. Steve Jobs was an acute businessman, and a visionary who brought Apple back to life after his return from his firing. The Apple of today is Tim Cook's baby, reinforced by his stock holders. Just my opinion.
Note that recent legal rulings have required Apple to make available documentation and spare parts so that (fearless and clueful) individuals and independent repair operations can do repairs on iThings, esp batteries, screens, other stuff. Apple has had a subscription service for iFonz for several years now. On the plan, every 2 years you get a new, fully-spiff iFon for a fixed price.
This is no different from leasing your car. The fact they are introducing it for Apple Silicon hardware probably says as much about the cost structure as anything. It also means they
expect a secondary global market to be worth the trouble.
As for "upgrading" hardware with the new Apple silicon, don't be mislead by the contortions the PC architecture has inflicted upon hardware designers. Thunderbolt 4 ports each have the bandwidth of several PCIe sockets on all but the most high-end motherboards with the latest non-Apple silicon. More importantly, data riding those 10 and 40 gigabit lanes don't have a death-march getting to or from main memory. Likewise, the "widget count" comparison of the Apple silicon graphics performance with the name-brand graphics cards has been knocked into a cocked hat because a huge pile of graphics data doesn't first have to be hauled from main memory and into graphics card memory in wheelbarrows before the shaders, et al, get going. All that data moving eats memory bandwidth that the CPU could be using to execute instructions.
I expect it won't be long (weeks!) before you see announcements of expansion boxes that speak Thunderbolt 4 with footprints very much like the new Studio machines. The race between storage based on spinning rust and solid-state devices is getting closer every week, so much so that a desktop storage box of 2 or 3 digit terabytes will soon speak Thunderbolt 4 with economics that raise serious questions about how much faster studio-scale networks need to be if filesystem traffic can avoid a trip down the hall to the shared NAS.
The most important rule Apple learned long, long ago was to fight the NEXT war, not the last.
I don’t truly have a problem with the classic Macintosh systems. They were, at least, serviceable. Laptops and phones with batteries glued in, the pursuit of thinness überalles, and software systems that are both constantly changing and neglecting the UNIX core of macOS… These things are not good. The complete integration of their system to one massive chip? This doesn't bother me as it is what yields such dramatic performance. However, Apple does lack imagination. It would be easy to add, at least, NVMe and SATA without severely sacrificing the performance of M1. Adding expansion via at least one PCIe slot in the Mac Studio vertically would have been easy. It would likewise have been simple to add one sidewise in the Mini. NVMe drives are small enough to fit in the thinnest of laptops, and making these machines easy to open and service would have been trivial (as Framework has proven). At this point, the non-serviceable nature of the Macintoshes and iTrinkets (and all of the other devices that follow the Apple’s lead) are becoming an environmental hazard. It’s super odd how people claim to care about the environment and then manufacture millions of tons of e-waste…
Maybe Steve Jobs seen his computers as an appliance like a stove or microwave where the Woz seen them as something to tinker with. However purposely making devices where you cannot repair them when they break is not cool. If they lease their hardware to you then if something happens to it they should be obligated to fix it and replace it when it's worn out since you are leasing the hardware. Like car companies lease vehicles today they should be on the hook to live up to their side. It just doesn't happen that way. IMHO you need to be very careful with the lease agreement. This may be good for some that want the shiny new device every 2 to 3 years but not for me. I want to be using the same hardware 10 or 15 years from now.
I aways knew Linux was better than Windows but the more I use it the more I realize it beats Mac too.
As you hinted, a very WEF mindset...
Jobs died 11 years ago, so though while I agree with you about Apple's current push for isolating the customer from ownership of their devices, I really can't fault Steve Jobs for the current Apple focus. For one thing, their stuff no longer "just works" - faulty keyboards, ghost displays, portless laptops with poor ventilation resulting in throttling, phones with no headphone jacks, etc., etc. Steve Jobs was an acute businessman, and a visionary who brought Apple back to life after his return from his firing. The Apple of today is Tim Cook's baby, reinforced by his stock holders. Just my opinion.
Note that recent legal rulings have required Apple to make available documentation and spare parts so that (fearless and clueful) individuals and independent repair operations can do repairs on iThings, esp batteries, screens, other stuff. Apple has had a subscription service for iFonz for several years now. On the plan, every 2 years you get a new, fully-spiff iFon for a fixed price.
This is no different from leasing your car. The fact they are introducing it for Apple Silicon hardware probably says as much about the cost structure as anything. It also means they
expect a secondary global market to be worth the trouble.
As for "upgrading" hardware with the new Apple silicon, don't be mislead by the contortions the PC architecture has inflicted upon hardware designers. Thunderbolt 4 ports each have the bandwidth of several PCIe sockets on all but the most high-end motherboards with the latest non-Apple silicon. More importantly, data riding those 10 and 40 gigabit lanes don't have a death-march getting to or from main memory. Likewise, the "widget count" comparison of the Apple silicon graphics performance with the name-brand graphics cards has been knocked into a cocked hat because a huge pile of graphics data doesn't first have to be hauled from main memory and into graphics card memory in wheelbarrows before the shaders, et al, get going. All that data moving eats memory bandwidth that the CPU could be using to execute instructions.
I expect it won't be long (weeks!) before you see announcements of expansion boxes that speak Thunderbolt 4 with footprints very much like the new Studio machines. The race between storage based on spinning rust and solid-state devices is getting closer every week, so much so that a desktop storage box of 2 or 3 digit terabytes will soon speak Thunderbolt 4 with economics that raise serious questions about how much faster studio-scale networks need to be if filesystem traffic can avoid a trip down the hall to the shared NAS.
The most important rule Apple learned long, long ago was to fight the NEXT war, not the last.