Thank goodness for Jean-Louis Gassée and his advocacy for user-serviceable, expandable Macs, starting with the Macintosh SE and Macintosh II in 1987. I have strong respect for Steve Jobs, but I agree with Jean-Louis Gassée on this issue, and my favorite Macs are user-serviceable. Even with Steve Jobs, the NeXT was far more open than the original Macintosh, though this may have been out of necessity since NeXT competed in the workstation market against companies like Sun and HP. Also, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Apple maintained a Power Macintosh/Mac Pro with internal expansion slots and user-serviceable RAM and storage throughout the rest of Steve Jobs’ life. Even the rest of the lineup was user-upgradable, even if it meant dealing with a lot of screws (like certain laptop models in the 2000s).
It wasn’t until Tim Cook took over that Macs became more locked-down in terms of user-serviceability and expandability, culminating with the switch to ARM, where Apple sells no Macs with user-upgradable RAM anymore.
Had Apple’s leadership been more focused in the “interregnum” years of 1985-1996, we could be using Dynabooks running some sort of modern Dylan/Common Lisp machine architecture with a refined Macintosh interface. Apple had all the pieces (Newton’s prototype Lisp OS, SK8, Dylan, OpenDoc, etc.), but unfortunately Apple was unfocused (Pink, Copland, etc.) while Microsoft gained a foothold with DOS/Windows. What could’ve been...my dream side project is to make this alternate universe a reality by building what’s essentially a modern Lisp machine.