And the other thing that bugs me is that, for a "Green" company, Apple sure seems to make a lot of disposable goods. Granted, as the resale value of Macs is high, it's pretty easy to sell older systems when upgrading to new ones. Still, there are lots of situations where one may not want to do that. Personally, I'm at an phase where the excitement of change isn't necessarily a good thing, and as I rely upon my systems to keep a roof over my family's head, a wholesale rip and replace can be stressful. Just had that happen with a new 5k iMac that I wound up having to return, after various hardware failures... that cost me productivity and lots of lost time.
Looking at Apple's current desktop/laptop lineup, almost nothing is replaceable or upgradeable. There's noting that can be upgraded on notebooks, and there are even some desktop that users can't upgrade RAM on (iMac 21). Compare this to say.... Dell. I can upgrade just about anything on all of their workstations, and even their laptops are fairly easily-user upgradeable. I was looking at the new whiz-bang XPS 15, and you can upgrade: RAM, SSD, NIC, etc. on that thing. few screws, and you're good to go. As someone mentioned above, this isn't just about future-proofness. Sometimes upgrades are needed for shifting use-cases (eh. CUDA).
So the nMP was largely about moving that product line to a rip & replace model, much like the rest of what Apple sells. Part of me really balks at this, as it's wasteful and seems somewhat greedy. And really, how to they expect us to invest in a workstation that they don't touch for a couple years? Hey, I get them being greedy - but don't try to gouge us with outdated technology, when there are so many better options about.
Speaking of greed, in my case, Apple's recent push to iCloud may be nudging me off of their ecosystem. I've been accustomed to my main workstation being a Mac, because it also served up the family ecosystem stuff locally (iPhoto, iTunes, etc.). This has worked well, enabling family and friends to curate and synchronize stuff locally. Now, with every recent OS X upgrade, Apple is pushing us farther and farther into their overpriced cloud. Some of us don't want every photo or movie we have shared on the cloud, and few of us are willing to pay to do so. And for work, many of us are already locked into some sort of corporate cloud service (I don't see myself insisting my colleagues or partners drop their Box or O365 accounts, for iCloud). This is an alarming trend... much like they did away with upgradeable systems, they are also trying to do away with family/SOHO servers.
From a family-personal perspective, Apple making it hard to update their desktops (nMP, iMAC/Mini) makes them less appealing. And Apple forcing users to rely on their Cloud, vs LAN/WAN services, is disturbing. From a professional perspective, most of the people I work with are 50/50 Mac/Win, so switching wouldn't be that hard.
Anyhow, I postponed my iMac upgrade for a bit longer, to see what Apple does with the nMP. But if it's still not very upgradeable, and they keep pushing local services into the cloud, A Dell Precision workstation is looking very appealing....
