You don't care that you can't change out the SSD, but you will care when you take your dead laptop to the Genius Bar and they tell you it's going to be cheaper to buy a new one and that your data is already gone.

I don’t see how this changes the calculus. Presumably the parent knew this when they bought the laptop. People buy cars that are stupidly expensive to repair all the time. Just because the cost of ownership of a Honda Civic is lower than a Mercedes doesn’t mean everyone’s gonna go with the Honda.

If it works like iOS and just flashes a warning then I don’t see the issue. The self-check thing is invaluable when buying used devices.

I could be wrong, but most mac users excluding developers don't know anything when they bought the laptop.

> that your data is already gone.

By the way, the parent comment was talking about this

All I care about is having a high-quality *nix machine. Right now, a MacBook Pro with macOS fits that bill well: the calculus may very well change, on both the hardware and OS side, when x86 is replaced with ARM64, though.

macOS on Apple silicon is just as UNIX as your Intel Mac was, at least at the moment.

One reason Apple laptops are popular is that people, on average, like both the laptops and the service they get from Apple.

No, I don't. I have backups of my data and, while it's not ideal that they can't swap out the SSD without swapping out the logic board, I don't care how they get it working again as long as they do get it working and Apple, at least in my experience, has been way more solid than any other computer manufacturer.

Cheaper to buy a new laptop than to replace an SSD? Come on, man. I feel like you've never owned an Apple laptop and you're getting your opinions on the genius bar from Louis Rossman. What you're describing is probably 0.001% of genius bar encounters.