I think this is because Apple uses two or three suppliers, so if you're lucky you'll get a Samsung SSD, but if you're unlucky you'll get a slower Toshiba SSD.
We need a class-action lawsuit that results in a cryptographic hash manifest of all hardware components being delivered with every purchase, or made available for lookup online by unit serial number. Alternately: labelling regulation, or voluntary disclosure.
Amazon could design a "showrooming" mobile app to augment the reality of Apple retail stores, with photos of the supply chain casino options on which the buyer is gambling, while they promote Amazon items which have guaranteed transparency on components.
The only ones over-promising and under-delivering are independent hardware reviewers who publish benchmark numbers Apple isn't guaranteeing.
Barring a recall, nobody cares which manufacturer their RAM comes from or the hard drive or optical drive or the battery cells or the WiFi chip (except for Linux users) or the LCD or even the NAND behind the SSD controller. The controller itself is the only component that Apple switches out with alternatives that aren't functionally indistinguishable, but I can't see any way to regulate that without also harfully restricting Apple's freedom to multi-source components in a ways that are strictly beneficial to consumers.
They can source the items from where ever they want, I don't really care that much. But when they advertise that their Flash-based PCI-Express based SSDs are 1.6x faster than the comparable SATA-models they are demonstrably lying. I don't like that.
This was a laptop in the $4k range, which puts it in the really-fucking-expensive line. I expected more, at the very least that they'd be more than willing to change it. But it powers on, so no problems according to Apple.
Consumers can decide (with non-vendor advice) what's beneficial for their goals (which are unknown to the vendor), but only if there is transparency on the ingredients inside the device. Vendors can change components as much as they want, as long as they disclose the components.
But who decides the granularity at which the components must be disclosed? Do they have to update the documentation every time they switch sources for things like capacitors? The overhead of doing that would cripple the supply chain and hurt everybody for the potential benefit of almost nobody.
Reasonable people can draw reasonable lines. We can use the last 20 years of the PC industry to come up with an initial list of consumer-impacting behavior.
If the behavioral targeting industry can fingerprint every possible aspect of browser behavior, and run subsecond auctions, OEMs can track a subset of BOMs on an annual cycle.
The main purpose of a hard drive is to read and write data. When one is much worse than one of the other alternatives they use, that adversely impacts the performance of the whole computer. Things that directly affect the user like that should be disclosed.
Would you be okay with one screen having twice the resolution of another on the same model laptop with the same part number?
If Apple were forced to standardise on a single SSD spec do you think they'd standardise on the higher spec component or the lower spec one? Clue - the higher spec components are almost certainly under supply constraints. You could even end up with higher spec components being intentionally crippled to match the performance of lower spec ones to comply with uniformity regulations.
Congratulations, you've now made the world worse for everybody, but at least it's 'fair'. Good job!
Any vendor is free to sell lottery tickets, but if they call those lottery tickets something else (e.g. a computer with fixed specs, rather than a range of possible specs), customers may be less than satisfied with the transaction.
There is nothing new about manufacturers sourcing parts from multiple suppliers. This is routine practice across many industries. Often it's necessary due to limitations in availability.
If you receive a computer from a supplier and find that it's higher-than-advertised spec parts have been intentionally downgraded to comply with uniformity regulations, would you be more satisfied with the transaction than if they had not been or less than satisfied?
Oh please. Nobody's talking about delivering products that are under the advertised specification. If they were doing that, they'd get sued in an eyeblink and rightly so.
