Being able to swap disks is a meaningful advantage. After all, it's the part most likely to fail first, and often first limitation people hit on a machine.
Storage tech is still advancing at a decent clip. In 5 years, there will probably be 4-6TB drives on the market with 2-4x the throughput for the same price as 1TB drives today.
But that’s another different battle, and has nothing to do with this change. Disks were already soldered down, and that’s a tradeoff.
I get that for some people swappable disks are great, but those people couldn’t really use pre-M1 macs. The only change is that instead of two different interfaces for non volatile storage, now there’s one.
We keep on hearing about folks needing to swap out disks out that are broken who ALSO don't have apple care AND are out of warranty? I mean, how many people is this vs the millions / billions of idevices out there? Apple simplifies / integrates like crazy - that is a focus for them. No separate bios flash - my guess is others start copying them personally.
Because apple products hold value so well, I just sell me 2 year old stuff and it can really knock down cost of the new stuff.
I was an original iphone user, and have been hearing about how unrepairable and how battery can't be swapped since then. I'll believe the iphone is unrepairable when I see it.
For those of your who suspect that these types of claims are a lie, they basically are. If you have elderly relatives, they often DO NOT want to upgrade their phone once they've got it working. A great gift is actually to take it into an apple store and pay for the "impossible" battery replacement for them.
It's $49-$69. You get a fresh new battery, all labor as well. OEM parts. My wife also doesn't care about the new phone, this is a nice and pretty cheap way to keep her old one ticking over.
Happy to do a comparison in 6 years on a Huawei vs Apple phone in terms of resale.
One thing to be careful of. I've been burned by used apple phones with second hand batteries in them. Apple now gives you a warning - worth checking for that if you buy used.
Storage tech is still advancing at a decent clip. In 5 years, there will probably be 4-6TB drives on the market with 2-4x the throughput for the same price as 1TB drives today.