> In the case of these laptops, you buy them to the specs you'll need at the end of the machine's useful life, at the full current price.
OK, I see what you are saying. The nit I have to pick with that particular sort of reasoning is that now Apple has put their customers in a bit of a bind:
- either you buy the absolute max spec (and hope that it includes the specs you'll need for that time span), or
- you risk buyers remorse as you end up in a situation where the laptop that you already handed over a small fortune for isn't up to the task
This past year I recently considered buying one of Lenovo's premium Thinkpad T-series laptops, but the fact that they had one (of two) RAM slots soldered put me off. I was buying this laptop for personal use, and so I didn't want to spend top dollar on it right then, but I didn't want to end up in a situation where what I had settled for wasn't enough.
I ended up going for one of the "budget" E-series Thinkpads, because (paradoxically) those do have fully upgradable RAM.
It's not just buyers remorse. If you use the machine for work and buy something under-spec'd - especially in RAM, you lose money by being less efficient with a slower machine.
The Thinkpad T490 (not the T490s) does have upgradeable RAM -- we settled on it for all our new developer machines. It's got an amazing keyboard and is fairly lightweight, but has every port you'd need, even VGA (and costs ~$1,000 for 8GB/256GB SSD).
It has one stick of upgradable RAM - better than nothing, but I wanted both sticks. Honestly, for a work laptop where you are going to be trading it out again in 3 years, that's probably fine.
My E495 currently has 8GB (2x4GB for better iGPU performance) and that's all I need for personal uses for now. But I can upgrade to 32GB later if I need to (and for less overall cost).
OK, I see what you are saying. The nit I have to pick with that particular sort of reasoning is that now Apple has put their customers in a bit of a bind:
- either you buy the absolute max spec (and hope that it includes the specs you'll need for that time span), or
- you risk buyers remorse as you end up in a situation where the laptop that you already handed over a small fortune for isn't up to the task
This past year I recently considered buying one of Lenovo's premium Thinkpad T-series laptops, but the fact that they had one (of two) RAM slots soldered put me off. I was buying this laptop for personal use, and so I didn't want to spend top dollar on it right then, but I didn't want to end up in a situation where what I had settled for wasn't enough.
I ended up going for one of the "budget" E-series Thinkpads, because (paradoxically) those do have fully upgradable RAM.