Thank goodness for Jean-Louis Gassée and his advocacy for user-serviceable, expandable Macs, starting with the Macintosh SE and Macintosh II in 1987. I have strong respect for Steve Jobs, but I agree with Jean-Louis Gassée on this issue, and my favorite Macs are user-serviceable. Even with Steve Jobs, the NeXT was far more open than the original Macintosh, though this may have been out of necessity since NeXT competed in the workstation market against companies like Sun and HP. Also, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Apple maintained a Power Macintosh/Mac Pro with internal expansion slots and user-serviceable RAM and storage throughout the rest of Steve Jobs’ life. Even the rest of the lineup was user-upgradable, even if it meant dealing with a lot of screws (like certain laptop models in the 2000s).
It wasn’t until Tim Cook took over that Macs became more locked-down in terms of user-serviceability and expandability, culminating with the switch to ARM, where Apple sells no Macs with user-upgradable RAM anymore.
Had Apple’s leadership been more focused in the “interregnum” years of 1985-1996, we could be using Dynabooks running some sort of modern Dylan/Common Lisp machine architecture with a refined Macintosh interface. Apple had all the pieces (Newton’s prototype Lisp OS, SK8, Dylan, OpenDoc, etc.), but unfortunately Apple was unfocused (Pink, Copland, etc.) while Microsoft gained a foothold with DOS/Windows. What could’ve been...my dream side project is to make this alternate universe a reality by building what’s essentially a modern Lisp machine.
I also would like an alternative universe where those Apple technologies succeed, however we also have to remeber by 1996 there wasn't much Apple left, and it was a matter of luck that NeXT's reverse acquisition worked out as well as it did, for where Apple is 30 years later.
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!
It wasn’t until Tim Cook took over that Macs became more locked-down in terms of user-serviceability and expandability, culminating with the switch to ARM, where Apple sells no Macs with user-upgradable RAM anymore.
Had Apple’s leadership been more focused in the “interregnum” years of 1985-1996, we could be using Dynabooks running some sort of modern Dylan/Common Lisp machine architecture with a refined Macintosh interface. Apple had all the pieces (Newton’s prototype Lisp OS, SK8, Dylan, OpenDoc, etc.), but unfortunately Apple was unfocused (Pink, Copland, etc.) while Microsoft gained a foothold with DOS/Windows. What could’ve been...my dream side project is to make this alternate universe a reality by building what’s essentially a modern Lisp machine.