It’s taken me a while to get here, but I’m here now and there’s no going back. I can no longer recommend Apple, especially Apple computers, to anyone. Apple has completely locked down all Apple computers, now that they’ve gone completely over to their Apple silicon processor design. All Apple computers look like every other computing device they sell, especially the iPhone.

What does this mean? It means that every internal subsystem that used to be separate, especially memory and SSDs, are now fully integrated into the SoC along with the CPU and GPU. The only way to replace anything in today’s Apple computers is to replace the entire motherboard. If you need more resources (memory and/or storage) then the only way to increase them is to buy a new machine. This means you need to make sure you know your needs for today as well as into the future, and purchase accordingly. Which you will pay much money accordingly, what many have referred to as the “Apple tax.”

I personally own a 2019 Apple MacBook Pro. It was purchased with a 2.4 GHz Intel i9 (8 core w/hyper-threading), 64 GB memory and 4 TB SSD. Even though this is the last Intel-based MacBook Pro, everything is soldered onto the motherboard. Nothing is replaceable. The only reason I have possession of this system is because it was purchased as part of a project I was involved with back in 2020-2021. Funding dried up for the project, leaving me with the hardware detritus I’d been allowed to collect in support of the project. Using an end-of-project bonus I purchased a 2020 13 inch MacBook Pro with Apple’s M1 (8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 NPU cores), 16 GB memory and 1 TB storage. It was heavily discounted at B&H Photo and Video up in New York, so I ordered it to complement the older 2019 MacBook Pro. The 13 inch is my field computer, as it is considerably cheaper (about 1/5th the cost) than the 2019 beast. The M1 MacBook runs considerably longer on battery and as far as I can tell, its operation under load is as performant as the Intel based MacBook Pro.

You’d think I would be happy, even thankful for such capabilities. For the most part you’d be right. But I already know how Apple likes to age out its older systems, in particular anything Intel based. I also own a 2015 15 inch MacBook Pro, which interestingly enough could only be purchased with a maximum of 16 GB of memory at the time. It also came with 1 TB of storage (SSD), which was all I could afford at the time. It is no longer capable of being upgraded with the latest macOS release. I am instead getting ready to swap out its SSD with a new blank one and preparing to install Linux on it. Even though that MacBook is eight years old, I consider it more valuable because of my ability to swap out critical resources like the SSD and then make it my own. I’ve been doing those OS migrations since the first machine I migrated from Windows Vista to Ubuntu in 2013, a 2010 Samsung notebook with a corrupted Vista installation. I’ve since done the same thing with a 17″ 2013 Samsung notebook, migrating from Windows 10 Pro to Linux Mint. I got tired of seeing the dialogs pop up when I installed a Windows 10 update that my machine was not capable of upgrading to Windows 11. Even the machine I’m writing this on, a Minis Forum UM250, was migrated from Windows 10 Pro to Linux Mint (along with several other Linux distributions before I settled on Mint). Absolutely everything continues to work, which I find quite remarkable, especially on the 2010 Samsung notebook which is running with Fedora 38. Can you imagine a 13-year-old Mac that runs the latest release of macOS? Neither can I. I will more than likely migrate the 2019 MacBook Pro to Linux in place (meaning I can’t play it safe and swap in a new blank SSD). As for the M1 MacBook Pro, I can only hope that Asahi Linux will actually be ready if and when Apple drops macOS support for it.

My personal recommendation, therefore, is to perform due diligence on purchasing a machine, to make sure it’s not so integrated that it’s totally locked down both physically and via software. macOS is more open than iOS right now, but who can say how long that will last. Buy Linux preinstalled if you can (say from a vendor like System76), or else purchase a Windows machine that can be upgraded to Linux in the future, especially one that has upgradeable/replaceable memory and storage. Unless you have a very specific need that requires Apple hardware and software, don’t buy Apple.