Unfortunately that is pretty true. And (apart from the price) the reason why I got a 2010 "cheesegrater" MP just recently. Given Apples "standards" this is by far the most customizable machine they ever had (easy access to drives, RAM, PCIe, fans, even the CPU can be upgraded more or less easily).Jim Roseberry wrote: ↑Mon Oct 08, 2018 2:33 pm Macs are slick machines... but Apple has abandoned their power-users.
And while I can sort of understand their idea of going for "unified" hardware, to make sure everything is compatible/stable, not being able to swap memory and drives yourself (at least not in case you're an average human being), not offering space and connection options inside their Mac Pros, etc. - well, that's quite another level of dumbing down things and planned obsolescence.
I have been upgrading the internal harddrive(s - exchanged the optical drive in favour of a second harddrive, another thing not possible anymore) of my Macbook around 7-8 times. Always got a new, bigger and faster one once they had acceptable prices. A matter of a few minutes, the only slight annoyance being the waiting time until the old drive was imaged. Almost completely impossible on any actual Mac. Ridiculous, especially when SSD prices are dropping like mad.