I hear this sentiment all the time that "pro users need the ability to upgrade" but not once in a decade of my professional programming career have I _ever_ seen a computer at a workplace upgraded. They get purchased, they get repaired, they get retired or they trickle down to "lesser users", but I've never seen anyone get additional RAM or a drop in CPU replacement on an employer-owned machine. If you needed a better computer all I've ever seen is a new computer purchased.

Yes, it may seem counter intuitive, but most Pro are the ones who dont want to fiddle around with their computers.

I've been a 'pro' software engineer for a couple decades and the large place's I've worked have actually upgraded machines that actually could be upgraded: with more ram, better video, etc. I did a couple years as an IT Consultant and every single small shop, contractor, developer, video editor, recording studio, who are also 'Pros' by the way, I've ever worked with has always looked to upgrade their hardware before buying again. At $4k - $17k a machine, it's simple math. The machine's not dead, but its time for a new gpu, or hard drive, or more ram. The pc platform is designed for upgrading, from mouse to motherboard. It takes work to make it not.

Thinking about it, Apple's genius has been finding this line: "How closed can we go, how disposable can we make them and maximize churn, while not slowing down buying. We can even create a desire for churn [it's September, time for a new $600 phone, anyone?] Its exactly like the one you have, only different." As others have pointed out here, the dog and pony show they put on recently, by inviting a select group of reporters (market influencers) into their hq was damage control when several magazines/sites called them out for crossing this line. New machines with lower specs than older machines, gaming battery life tests, irrational pricing, and selling 5 year old spec machines as 'Pro'. I might recommend reading the reporting of the meeting, it's a textbook example of high-end one-on-one selling, impressive location, the appearance of insider-access, sealed with a personal commitment from the leaders. Meanwhile, they don't have a 'pro' product line, and though they have enough cash on hand to buy every pro team in every sport in the U.S. they haven't made any investments or advancements in pro pc technology in a decade. And that's cool, if apple doesn't want to fill the gap, someone will fill the space eventually.

And I concede that the headphone jack is fine, it;s a combo, first glance i assumed just output. That works.

Apple clearly think that the segment of the 'pro' market that desires upgradability is smaller than the reach they get from having 'all-in-one'.

By the time a top of the line PC needs an "upgrade", an entirely different CPU/RAM architecture will probably be top of the line anyways.

well since we're sharing anecdotes I have seen machines get upgraded at work.

working on a game. PVS calc took lots of memory and lots of time. Everyone's machines got a 6x upgrade in ram so they could be used at night to compute the PVS.

another anecdote. friend in another game found rebuilding assets on SSD was several X faster. Since the entire team was often waiting hours for asset builds to finish all machines got upgraded to have SSD.

this is especially true in GPU related fields. new gpus enable new things

I'm sure it happens in many industries, but my point is that I don't think it makes this an "amateur" computer. Plenty of professional employees will want one, get one, and will be completely unaffected by the design. Plenty of people will be on the other side of that too.

I've seen increased RAM and changed video cards to get multiple screens. The company I work for buys 1 standard setup, then upgrades depending on who's using it.

Counter anecdote: my workplace performed SSD + RAM upgrades for everyone and that fit well within that year's budget. The alternative would have to wait another year (or more) to replace all the laptops at a much greater cost.

I worked briefly in IT and a large part of my job was to go around and upgrade the RAM on people's machines. Not saying it's common across the industry but it is done.

> Pro's need a machine that can evolve over time.

Is this really true though for Apple's target market? I'm guessing that if I'm an artist for Pixar and I need a new "professional" machine, the company is 9 times out of 10 going to buy me a new computer rather than buying me a video card upgrade. I'd imagine most large corporations would do something like that since it's more scalable than upgrading individual parts piecemeal.

Buying one "pro" machine and upgrading it over a number of years seems like more of what I'd call an "enthusiast" strategy. I think it's reasonable that Apple is betting that Mac "enthusiasts" would be willing to upgrade their machine wholesale after a number of years (maybe recouping value by reselling their old machine) rather than extensively researching new video cards and buying one off Newegg.

Maybe they're wrong and people aren't willing to do that, but it's their prerogative to place that bet.

Professional Independent contractors, sure I’ll buy that argument.

Never once, in all of the tech companies I’ve worked for, have I seen anyone upgrade a computer. Even recently, my Mac had an issue with parallels that couldn’t get resolved. New Mac given to me.

Coworker had a 1.5 year old thinkpad. Just needed to swap the RAM from 8 to 16. Nope, just was given a new Thinkpad with 16 gigs instead of spending $150 on RAM.

Companies write off a ton of these expenses, and they don’t “upgrade” the hardware. They upgrade the machine.

They'd be stupid to throw away money / working components. Often, old PCs go back to a "pool", where they are upgraded or scavenged for parts, and then given to new employees. Only when they are too old to upgrade, or it is not worth the work, they are sold to employees or dumped. From the perspective of employees, you just get a new PC.

Essentially you just need a room for parts and a few employees part time, and you can use your computing resources much more efficiently - basically free money. Granted, it only works for organisations of a certain size (large corporations, universities, gov.).

Your anecdotal experience is opposite of mine: at my place, we still use 4-5 year old computers, and frequently upgrade hard drives, memory, video cards even when needed. We have a few rooms dedicated to spare parts, and when we can't find what we need, new ones are bought. And honestly, my 4yo PC doesn't really need upgrading just so I can open my IDE or browser 20 seconds faster.

Granted, we are an enterprise shop with a few dozen devs - exactly two people have a mac. So we're not exactly Apple's target (enterprise never was)

I will say that we had some issues at one fortune 500 company where we were passing RAM sticks out to contractors because the computers had pitiful amounts of memory, but they weren't fully capitalized.

Dumb things happen when productivity is abstracted. But again, these are not the people given iMac pros.

> And no mic input? Why? That's just silly. It cost them more to leave that out.

Do you mean separate mic input? Because it has the same combo headphone jack as all existing Macs. So it has mic input.

As a pro audio user, a built-in mic input is useless anyway. We have external USB3, TB, or Firewire interfaces for that. Lower noise, better DACs, phantom power, HiZ and XLR inputs, etc.

Beyond pro, nobody uses mic input unless they are using an iPhone headset on their Mac. Everyone is using USB mikes/headsets.

Ah.. a combo. that works

Pros generally want to be paid for their time, and it’s hard to get someone to pay you a nice rate to fiddle with your machine.