TUAW details just how locked-down the latest generation of MacBook Pros are. The memory is soldered to the motherboard, the battery is glued to the case, which in turn is glued to the "delicate trackpad cable." It has special screws designed to discourage people from opening up the case. Why would Apple do this? One reason is likely price discrimination:
My last MacBook Pro saw a little over 2.5 years as my primary computer, and I would expect no less of any computer I was paying in excess of $2200/£1800 for. In that time, I upgraded the memory once, the hard drive three times, and replaced the battery once. None of these options would be available to me with a new MBPwRD. SSDs, batteries, and RAM can degrade or fail in time -- is a $349 AppleCare purchase a hard requirement now? What if I want to keep my MacBook longer than the three years coverage AppleCare offers?
This would be a smaller problem if it wasn't for Apple's upfront upgrade costs, which could be reasonably described as daylight robbery. It charges $200 to upgrade the RAM from 8 GB to 16 GB -- that costs around $85 on the open market. Changing the SSD from 256 GB to 512 GB is $600 (including a modest CPU upgrade from 2.3 GHz to 2.6 GHz). Upgrading from 512 GB to 768 GB is a further $500. Meanwhile, in off-the-shelf land, an entire top-of-the-line 512 GB SSD can be had for $415 today, with 256 GB models around $280.
By locking down the laptop and then charging a premium for warranties and upgrades, Apple is forcing power users to pay a hefty premium. Eli Dourado would tell us that this is another example of price discrimination in action: by charging the wealthiest customers an arm and a leg, Apple is able to generate extra profits it can plow into research and development. That, in turn, enables the firm to keep the cost of its entry-level MacBooks down.
I don't love the direction Apple is taking the Mac platform. But you won't find me raising the kind of concerns I've raised in the past about price discrimination by Comcast. And one big reason is competition. There are a number of companies out there—Dell, Lenovo, Sony, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Toshiba, Samsung, HP, Acer, Asus, and many others—who have the resources, opportunity, and incentive to build better computing devices. If they fail to do so—and, frankly, history suggests they probably will—that will be strong evidence that Apple has continued to relentlessly improve its products to stay ahead of the competition.
On the other hand, if Apple were to ever stop innovating, it would rapidly find it was no longer able to get away with charging premium prices. And pretty soon it would start losing market share. So while I'm not always enthusiastic about Apple's design decisions, I think regulators should assume Apple knows how to meet its customers needs and keep their hands off.
The broadband market is very different. Like Apple, Comcast offers a product that's dramatically better than anything else on the market. But unlike Apple, Comcast's dominant position is not due to years of relentless innovation. Rather, it's primarily due to the fact in many communities Comcast enjoys a monopoly franchise agreement. And it turns out that coaxial cables are a better medium for offering high-speed Internet access than other kinds of utility cables that were already in the ground at the turn of the century. So largely by accident, Comcast is able to offer much better broadband at a much lower cost than anyone else.
Only a handful of companies—Verizon, AT&T, and maybe Sprint—have a realistic opportunity to challenge Comcast in most parts of the country. For anyone else to enter the market would require not just massive investment but also struggling through an impenetrable thicket of regulatory constraints.
As a result, Comcast looks set to enjoy a dominant market position in the coming years without significant innovation. The company established a 250 GB bandwidth cap in 2008 and has raised it only 20 percent in the last four years. This lack of progress doesn't seem to be driven by technical constraints. Rather, the firm appears to have simply calculated that crippling its own product will maximize profits. Apple wouldn't be able to get away with that sort of strategy because it faces serious competition.
