They have the "pro" line for a reason. It's meant for professionals. It's okay to solder RAM and SSD in lower-end models I suppose, but not in those people actually use to get their job done.

I must agree with this. About a year ago, our company's iOS development team was replaced. The managers bought the new developers company MBPs. However, after about six months they started complaining that they could not make progress on one feature because Xcode kept crashing when they opened an existing Storyboard file. Turns out the managers had of course cheaped out and bought the developers Macs with the lowest 8GB memory option. Meanwhile, the consultants who originally created those files had had much more sensible 32GB.

Now the MBPs for the whole team need to be replaced at great cost and double the environmental resource use. Without Apple soldering the memory our IT department would have certainly just upgraded the memory. In fact, when I ran into similar issue with needing 32GB to my 16GB Dell laptop, that's exactly what we did.

Or they could have just bought the max version the first go around. If it's for production the +$1k/dev is less than a few days of pay.

> double the environmental resource use

I mean, they're not defective, they can be refurbished.

Theoretically yes, if they were for example managed by a leasing company.

In this case, the company actually only officially supports (leases) Windows laptops. Macs should not officially exist to start with, but are nevertheless required for iOS app development. So MBPs are handled as "extra" IT equipment. If there is no use for such a piece of IT equipment (e.g. it is underpowered or otherwise not fit for purpose) AND it contains sensitive business data (like a developer computer almost certainly does), it is actually a security issue for the company.

So for security reasons the company would actually prefer that such computer be DESTROYED when there is no use for it anymore. Sadly you can not even remove the hard drive from a MBP and sell/give it to a employee for personal use, so Apple soldering the components on the mainboard is a double whammy.

Don't recent Apple computers have hardware encryption by default through the T2 chip? Just throw away the key and all data on disk should be irretrievable. Replacing the disk in this case would add no security, so it would be the wasteful course of action.

Company policies don't care about crypo used I guess.

I guess more like they don't have a contract with Apple that says Apple guarantees the data security is protected by their tech.

Ah, fair enough.

Apple can decrease environmental cost of early replacing MBP by not providing chargers, like they did with iPhones.

I'm not the kind of person who throws electronics away, but, you know, there's a proven and reliable way to decrease the environmental cost: don't make your damn devices disposable. Design them to be taken apart and make consumable components easily replaceable by the end user. But I guess non-disposable devices don't make charts go up as much as disposable ones do.

Case in point: the M1 Mac Mini internals are half electronics, half air. They could've easily fit all kinds of slots and modular components in there, yet they deliberately decided not to.

Oh, great, yes, that is certainly going to have a huge impact.

Because the chargers are known to have a huge impact because of all the rare earth in them.