Retina MacBook Pro full of Air-style proprietary parts

(a) The RAM capacity is limited by the chipset anyway, and on "pro" machines, most people max out the RAM when they purchase or directly after. It's just that now you can't cheat and buy the RAM elsewhere to avoid an apple price premium.

(b) The SSD is replaceable, it's just not a standard connector. Obviously, 3rd party replacements will show up with a slightly higher cost than a bog standard SATA drive. I view this like the replacement of FW with tbolt, who cares?

(c) (Stock) RAM seldom goes bad before other components, and if it does, you treat it like the other components. They can unplug the SSD from your MBP and plug it into an identical one, swap complete. So we're not talking weeks for a replacement here -- just go to an Apple store. If you're not near an Apple store, you're probably not near a vendor of replacement RAM or SSD drives either.

One issue though: You had better keep that SSD backed up! 'cause if the machine goes south, you have no way of accessing your data unless someone comes out with a apple propretary card egd to sata adapter.

I have a 2nd gen 13" Air that I got in late '10. Seeing that the 2 year mark will be upon it and it's still supported by Mountain Lion. I have a late '07 Mac Pro that is not supported.

I'm sort of in the middle of this. On one hand, I'd love to keep using my Pro because it still works fine (and I'm one of those types that get's pissed when the machine is slow). I've had to upgrade to ssd, put an ATI 4870 in it, filled it with 16GB ram, still has stock 2x2 3ghz Xeon's. But this has been my main development machine for years and has made me a good amount of money over the years, so I see the upgrades and very reasonable. I still think I could run Mountain Lion fine, but there's the whole 32-bit EFI thing that Apple has handcuffed it with. So this is the downside for me.

On the other hand, I'm not against modernizing everything. I think that Apple does not have to support years of legacy hardware like Microsoft does is a good thing. We can always be assured of the latest and greatest. If I could get min 2-4 years out of a laptop, that would be good for me.

As for Apple locking everything down? I see why they do it - it's all about design. Why include a thicker ram slot(s) when you can just solder it on the board and reduce your profile, or give you better space. We're going to see more and more custom from them, trending away from using off the shelf parts that everyone else will have to use. This will give them a competitive differentiator, which it already does with their unibody laptops.

However, the obvious downside (mostly for geeks/power users) is that we can't buy the 8gb ram option now for less, and then upgrade later. So we're forced into that decision quandary of buy for less now with not what we really want, or pay through the nose up front, grumble a bit, then go on our merry way. The latter is usually where I fall in.

SSDs with smarter controllers and filesystems which don't abuse the disk make a huge difference. Apple controls all of these so they should have a much better idea of the reliability factor - and even if you pay for repairs, there's a high risk that an early failure will make you less likely to buy from them next time.