You don't understand my point, I love what Apple has done with the M1, and I was a Mac User for the first time working in Post-Audio, going to Windows in 2016 because they've completely abandoned the professional market. But now they swerved back and I am grateful for it but I don't condone their upgrade practices without letting giving the users the self-upgradability.
I'm fine with the ram on the chip, which is shared chip accessed memory, I actually approve of it. What i don't approve of is having the encryption now "ON THE CHIP" and yet set up the base model with soldered on storage. Now there is no technical hindering based on the M2 chip, now it's purely trying to make money of people without relaying to actual technical obstacles.
The above isn't at all what you conveyed in your first post in this thread.
My point was that tons of people do just fine with 256GB storage - that's the storage size my company deploys to our thousands of full time professional employees - and some manufacturers are shipping business targeted systems with even less.
As for the pricing, 256 to 512GB storage is a US$180 differential in the Education store, which you as a student would have access to over here. I'm unsure why that would translate to €250, and I'm seeing €230 at both the German and Spanish retail Apple stores, and likely lower if they offer a similar education discount in the EU. Doesn't really matter though, it is what it is, and for some folks that'd make their desired configurations too expensive.
I suspect you misunderstand Apple's marketing position - they might claim to care, but they're still going to charge a hefty premium. Apple has typically been happy to cede the low-price market to others, targeting the higher priced segment; capturing interest with base model configs and capturing further profits with expensive upgrade options. They are, after all, a profit-focused global megacorporation and you shouldn't let yourself get fooled into thinking they're anything different.
Don't take the above as some sort of "defense" of Apple - it's simply a statement of what they are, without the starry-eyed notion that they "care" about anything beyond how much money they can get people to give them.
Back in 2016, I happily switched to Windows 10 because Apple couldn't offer me things I needed for a reasonable price.
Back in 2020, I got really excited, seeing an in-house based chip at a great price point with plenty of battery and portability, to be only disappointed by the mere 256 Gigabytes of storage it comes with.
What upsets me equally is then obviously again the price point for which you go from 256 to 512 Gigabytes. I mean, 50 Euro would be realistic, 100 to 120 I'd be willing to give for the brand premium but 250 is just ludacris.
I don't understand how people just suck up these rip-off prices from a company which claims to care for their customer and user experience.
Even as a student, 256 are not going to be enough. Just papers and docs are about 200 Gigabytes every semester for me and with which memory am I going to install apps now?
These machines don't even come with an sd-card Slot for memory extension.
The only person who'd be able to survive with 256 Gigabytes of non-upgradable storage would be my grandma and she'd probably meet the storage's capacity at some point as well.
I'd love to get an M1 device but I'm just very sensible to being ripped of and will probably pick a new Ryzen 5000 laptop up, which probably won't look as nice as the M1, won't have an equally good display and probably half the battery life but at least I'll get upgradable storage, almost twice the processing power of the M1 and upgradable Ram.
I was really enticed to go back to Apple but their business practices just kept me from going back to an old beloved brand.
