[Snazzy Labs] The $600 Mac Mini is a Steal—Until It’s a Scam
I remember in 2007, buying my first MacBook. It came with an enormous 2gb of RAM. I asked about upgrading it. The guy leaned in conspiratorially and told me that Apple's RAM upgrades were a rip-off, and that I'd be better of buying it elsewhere. So I did, for half of what Apple were asking.
This is a grift that Apple have had for far too long, and there's a part of me that's convinced that their move to soldered RAM was to stop people upgrading after the fact more than it was about SOC efficiencies.
I will hold on to my upgradeable 2018 mac mini which I put 64gb into for as long as I can (which will likely be pretty long since RAM is the only bottleneck in most macs and 64gb makes everything instant), then I will probably leave the Apple ecosystem.
Yes the RAM is. For SSD I have all my home folders on an external 3TB SSD RAID array that's about the same speed as the internal storage. This allowed me to buy the base model and save a few thousand $$ by upgrading it.
When the software ecosystem gets too old, slap Linux on it for a fresh lease of life. Did that with my old macbook pro back in the day. Got years more out of it.