HOHIMER

I predicted (told my Grandson) several years ago that computers will eventually become ‘bare bones’ to maintain the price and be sold without any (or very little) storage space on board. This will force everyone to pay for cloud storage and /or external drives.
Also, the computers for use in public places will be just a CPU, power supply, RAM, WiFi, keyboard and monitor; with no place for storage. You will need to attach your own special Flash Drive containing the operating system, Browser, the programs you will be using and some storage to be able to use them.
In other words, you will carrying your computer around with you on a Flash Drive that you can plug into any ‘standard bare bones machine’ available everywhere coffee or burgers are sold.

andesbill

The internal drive is for apps. External storage drives are for files.
You do not want to keep scrubbing your internal drive as it goes from accessing the app to the file it is using. That way lies a quicker death (for the drive that is).

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Right. No more optical drives. Try installing a program from a disk. Try loading your CD collection onto your computer without a CD drive. Buying a separate external drive is your only option. You can't be certain to have an SD card slot, either.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Yes, it does cost, but it costs a lot less to buy your own hardware than buying it from Dell. I get a basic computer and upgrade it myself.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Apple has billions of phones, tablets, and computers in the wild. That becomes a support issue when you have socketed RAM, socketed drives, socketed whatever. Every pin of a multi-pin connector is a failure point. The likelihood of your machine having such a failure is tiny, but when you multiply that by billions... The failure rate is a pretty big number.

So Apple now integrates everything they can, and solders everything they can't integrate. It really does increase reliability when moisture and oxygen can't interfere with connections over time. It also makes assembly faster and less costly when a machine can do it.

One HUGE reason memory is on the processor die, and storage is close to it, is SPEED. Electrons travel a little slower than the speed of light, so the closer you can keep a source and a destination, the more nanoseconds you save. As Naval Admiral and computer guru, Grace Hopper, once said (here — https://youtu.be/9eyFDBPk4Yw ), the maximum distance electrons can travel in a billionth of a second (nanosecond) is 11.8 inches. When you're making tens of billions of calculations per second, memory bandwidth matters. In the M1 it is 68.25GB/s. In the M1 Ultra it is 800GB/s!

Then there is what the cynics will say is the monopoly factor. Apple is the only company selling iOS phones, iPadOS tablets, and MacOS computers. So they can build them however the hell they want to, and charge what the market will bear. That is how they have managed to become one of, and at times THE, world's most profitable company. They control the entire stack of technology from design and build, to software and operating systems.

That's also why Apple users are so tenaciously devoted to their ecosystem. It just works. Their design and engineering culture is user-centric. They don't sacrifice innovation for long-term compatibility. They don't expect people to try (or want) to run 20 year old business software on their new computers.

Optical drives do not fit the needs of content producers to protect copyrights. That is why the industry has moved to an "all online" mentality. They do not want you to have physical media containing copyrighted material, because inevitably, people figure out how to bootleg it. They will GLADLY sell you a download. You can backup the download, but it is "keyed" to your system, so you can't copy it and distribute it outside the limits of the EULA (end user license agreement).

Thankfully, optical drives and software are still available from some vendors. OWC still sells them. https://eshop.macsales.com/search/?q=optical+drives

If you buy a Mac, the expectation is that you will use Thunderbolt 3 or 4 to connect a dock or hub or dongle, and connect non-Thunderbolt external accessories to that (audio, video, Ethernet, drives, scanners, memory cards, etc. ALL connect to Thunderbolt 3 or 4 and Thunderbolt 3 and 4 are both compatible with USB4 devices). Those who need extreme speed can connect devices directly to a Thunderbolt USB-C port.

I hope that helps. Yeah, I wish I had a box with slots and drive bays, too, but that would be the current Intel Mac Pro, priced in the stratosphere... And the Mac Pro is SLOWER at most tasks than a lowly MacBook Air (until it comes to certain multi-core and video graphics tasks).

BebuLamar

I do not like what Apple is doing but it makes Apple a lot of money so other manufacturers follow. I can't complain.

SteveR Loc: Michigan

Jerry, don't I remember that you purchased a 13" Mac M1? You can get up to 2tb in that.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

The 14" and 16" Pro models go to 8 TB.

The 24" iMac, Mac mini, and 13" laptops are "consumer grade" machines (even though the 13" Pro exists...). But plenty of folks do professional work with them. They do top out at 2TB, which is plenty for most folks.

The sweet spots of the M1/M2 MacBook Air product line have 16GB memory and 1TB storage. External storage is less costly than internal, unless it is the same speed... then it is about the same cost/TB. Those buying an M2 MacBook Air should AVOID the base model with 256 GB storage because it lacks the RAID array found in larger capacity models. The M1 base model used two 128GB memory modules in a RAID configuration. The M2 base has just one 256GB chip, which creates bottlenecks. So get at least 512GB storage in an M2 Mac!

SteveR Loc: Michigan

Then, ofc, there's the M1 Max which has more ram, I think 64GB. The M1 also comes in an awesome 16" machine. The M2, only a 13". My son has the M1 Max. It's on my list. The added ram and memory is especially good for video editing. But, ofc, that's not what this site is about, right?

pmsc70d Loc: Post Falls, Idaho

I have a 2015 MacBook Pro with 128 GB. I added a 256 GB SD card where I put all my data. The native 128 GB drive is constantly filling up and preventing my software from running until I delete things. However, since I don't put anything on the 128 drive, I have no idea where all the stuff comes from, and what is safe to delete. Always a game of chance. Will never get a drive that small again.

Manglesphoto Loc: 70 miles south of St.Louis

I connect my Optical Drive to my iMac and my Mac book pro using a usb cable, No big deal just not intern

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Let me offer a (good natured) alternate point of view on the non upgradability of new Macs.

While Apple products do have many advantages (I’m writing this on an IPad), trying to portray the soldered in on chip memory and storage as a reliability and/or speed advantage reminds me of the old computer marketing axiom: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. In truth, and I have worked on and sold the largest machines in the world - with 50-100,000 CPUs (1 million+ cores) and 200 PB of main memory. All these hundreds of thousands devices are socketed, and I can’t ever remember a failure due to a poor CPU or memory pin-to-socket interface. Power supplies fail, drives fail, cooling fails, very occasionally a device fails, and very often SW fails, but you just don’t see connection failures at the socket. Yes, every connection is a potential failure point, but it’s the ribbon connectors, interconnects and power connectors, not the gold contacts on the CPU, DRAM and m.2 SSDs.j

Now regarding speed, yes, The internal BW of some of the newer M series devices are quite high - the m.1 memory BW is the same as PCIe 5.0 (64GB/sec) which is standard on new PC MBs, and the speed of the new ultra device is very high - I believe the spec is 800GB/sec (PCIe 6.0 is 256GB/sec), but let’s not forget that the actual transfer speed is generally limited by the CPU and DRAM (and SSD’s) silicon’s ability to drive the bus. Real world tests show the max running in the neighborhood of 225-250MB/sec - about the same is PCIe 6.0 which is now being used on many GPU cards. (https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/2)

So personally, I still think the advantage of upgradability outweighs any potential advantages of soldered in components or systems on a chip (and the supercomputing world does also - there are zero Apple clusters in the top 500 largest/fastest machines in the world). It’s just cheaper to make and insures obsolescence, making the system even more closed. The reason to buy Apple is the compatibility across devices, painless backup and migration, simple user interface and maybe (but not always) support. An excellent turn-key user friendly compute system (at a price) but speed isn’t one of the advantages - any new machine whether M.1 or I-7 or AMD equivalent is fast enough that you rarely, if ever, wait on the machine.

BebuLamar

The thing is what they charge per TB is very high. I would rather buy a small one as on the beginning I wouldn't have to many files. Once I have more files and software and I decide that the computer is still good for some time I can buy larger storage at which time the price is lower (much lower if you account for inflation).
However, I know making the computer non upgradable generates a lot more profit.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

There is a point of diminishing marginal returns. Most people on this site either buy too little computer or buy too much computer. It takes time and a bit of foresight to "right size" one.

One of my favorite YouTube musician-storyteller-videographer-creators, Mary Spender, bought a 16" MacBook Pro with 2TB storage and 64GB memory and M1 Max, to do multi-track music recording and production. She could have made her recent double album on a nicely spec'd out MacBook Air, but hey, she'll never run out of tracks or power to run audio processing plug-ins. And she can edit any sort of video for YouTube... even work in 8K, which is absurd for YouTubers.

https://youtu.be/H3BGFWoqA9E (her review of the MBP)
https://youtu.be/PtyKA0t7BoA (her latest creation)

TheShoe Loc: Lacey, WA

If it will accept USB connections, you can attach them by that method.