And then people would stick alphabet-soup SD cards into their devices and complain about performance and data integrity, it's enough of a headache in the Android world already (or has been before Samsung and others finally decided to put in enough storage for people to not rely on SD cards any more).
In contrast, Apple's internal storage to my knowledge always is very durable NVMe, attached logically and physically directly to the CPU, which makes their shenanigans with low RAM size possible in the first place - they swap like hell but as a user you barely notice it because it's so blazing fast.
Yeah jackasses are always gonna jackass. There's still a public interest in making devices upgradable for the purpose of minimizing e-waste.
I'd just love to buy a device with a moderate amount of unupgreadable SSD and an SD slot so that I can put a more memory in it later so the device can last longer.
Agreed but please with something other than microSD cards. Yes, microSD Express is a thing, but both cards and hosts supporting it are rare, the size format doesn't exactly lend itself to durable flash chips, thermals are questionable, and even the most modern microSD Express cards barely hit 800 MB/sec speed, whereas Apple's stuff has hit twice or more that for years [2].
In contrast, Apple's internal storage to my knowledge always is very durable NVMe, attached logically and physically directly to the CPU, which makes their shenanigans with low RAM size possible in the first place - they swap like hell but as a user you barely notice it because it's so blazing fast.