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Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

For years Apple has wanted to get closer and closer to the "appliance" model for their products. They are targeting consumers who's gut instinct when it comes to fixing their computers is to call a "geek". These consumers just want the damn things to work and would rather not worry about upgrading it over time. This is of course very unattractive to the hacker crowd, but they make up a much smaller percentage of the computer using public now than they did 20 years ago.

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Even as a person who works with computers a lot, I'd still rather just have a "geek" fix my computer. As much as I like hacking around on stuff I usually have better things to hack on and I expect my computer to just work when aiding me.

No, they are targeting consumers who call their "bank".

The service life of modern computers is more than 3 years. So instead of buying a 16GB memory upgrade for $29 in 2015 to rejuvenate your laptop, you're looking at buying another $2,000 device. (Assuming that Apple doesn't decide that you only need an iPad 8)

I generally replace my laptops on a 4-5 year schedule and have not performed upgrades on any of those systems. Usually by year four I'm thinking that some upgrades would be nice, but there are usually major improvements on the newer systems that make putting money into my old system of questionable worth.

So while I get where you are coming from, I do question how many actually take advantage of that ability? I imagine it is an exceedingly small group.

Considering that the cost of electronics has generally gone down over time, there's no guarantee that you'll spend that much to replace it then.

The average person doesn't need 16GB of memory, and by the time they do, they need a new computer anyways.

The average person doesn't run Chrome and Gmail?

There is something seriously wrong with your computer if you feel that 16GB is required to run Chrome and a webapp.

I would have thought so too, but with where "web 2.0" is going nowadays...

That's been their aim for decades, really. The original 1984 Macintosh was both praised and criticized, at the time, for its all-in-one, closed-box design.

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