Apple right now makes some of the best hardware you can buy, and they are pretty profitable doing it. The problem is I can't upgrade it. I would spend a fair bit of money for a good quality (materials, and parts) laptop. No one seems to be doing that any more. Most laptops have these huge clunky plastic cases, with cheap parts, and terrible support.
How do you define "upgrade it."
Lenovo sells the Yoga ultrabook, it's thin, affordable $800-$1,000, has a great (in my opinion) build quality using soft touch plastic, includes a Haswell processor, and you can manually upgrade the SSD and RAM. It has a cheap wifi chip (no 5ghz? really?), but otherwise fits the bill you described.
Is the storage and ram enough? Or do you want more than that. Because I imagine it gets really tricky to build a thin, light, sturdy and reliable laptop that still lets you upgrade every single part.
-Beautiful
-User upgradeable/serviceable
-Affordable
It's a wonderful design, however Apple has since decided to solder the SSD and memory to the mainboard, making them non-serviceable. This is not a choice made to make the device more beautiful or more affordable. They did it to be greedy.
We as consumers can have all three if we demanded it, but there's money to be made cutting corners and most people don't understand how to vote with their dollars.