Agreed. I'm willing to put up with soldered-on RAM and minimal expansion for my rMBP because I see benefits from it. I don't see any such benefits in this Mac. I can just build a Hackintosh and be done with it, and I think that's what I'll do next.
I'd like to buy a rMBP, but the non expandibility annoys me. I have mid 2012 MBP 4GB RAM, 512GB HDD, and I was able to gradually upgrade it to 16GB together with 960GB SSD. It is certainly heavier than the rMBP but it suits my needs perfectly.
In comparison, the rMBP has a perfect display, but I will need to get the most expensive model. I'd also lose on ethernet support, and need to get an adapter. I am not sure why rMBP lacks an Ethernet port in any case, this is supposed to be a laptop for professionals. Sometimes my job requires me to have Ethernet access.
I honestly don't care about making my devices thinner and thinner. My iPhone 4 is thin enough. My laptop may be heavy but it's more of a desktop replacement anyway.
> I honestly don't care about making my devices thinner
> and thinner. My iPhone 4 is thin enough. My laptop may
> be heavy but it's more of a desktop replacement anyway.
It's the same for me. My 2010 MBP is my primary machine, and I'd much rather a thicker laptop with user-replaceable RAM and storage. Apple spent a lot of time building laptops that were ~1" thick and had these options, so I know that they can do it. They just don't want to do it any more; they'd rather we buy new laptops every ~3 years than gradually upgrade our current ones to last twice that time.
I know I can use an adapter, but it's one more thing to carry around, lose, or get stolen. It's an extra cost to the user, and one more device dangling off my laptop.
If you lay your laptop flat on your desk. If you're using a stand, take care with your cable such that there's not adverse strain pulling down on the adapter. I'm just thankful that only cost me 2 TB-GigE adapters when I was using a Rain Design mStand with the fully specced out 15" rMBP from work (rather than killing the port itself).
And your Hackintosh will crash, make noise and draw too much power. To an increasingly large segment of the market, these cons far outweigh the possibility of a RAM upgrade.
I've built multiple Hackintoshes. They don't crash if you've been smart about part purchases. One of my last two was passively cooled, and I don't care anymore about noise because the machine itself can live in a closet (cable drops outside). And sure, my last Hackintosh drew a lot of power. It was also an i7-875K running at 3.5GHz, which I couldn't get in anything except a $3K Mac Pro at the time. (Total BOM for that machine, which is still in use albeit as a Windows PC: $800.)
But anyway, I don't care about the "increasingly large segment of the market". I care about me. So I don't know why you're fluttering about.
It's not that bad as it was a few years ago. I updated mine today to Yosemite and it was painful but bearable. I bought my hardware with osx86 in mind, it doesn't give me much trouble.
No crashes. Noise and power consumption are dependent on what hardware you pick. I was waiting for the new Minis but seeing them I think I'll just keep my i3, RAM, SDD and get a smaller form factor motherboard and keep using the hackintosh.
