Comment by wwweston

> Apple's era of easily (or even hot) swappable parts.

This. It existed. The laptops still commanded enthusiasm, felt great, capable, and solid without being too heavy, and had swappable RAM and disk. Keyboard and battery swap were screwdriver set DIYs. Heck, the old Pismos had hot swappable battery and drive bays.

I'm still frequently using a MacBook Pro 11,3. Only lets you swap the drive but that by itself is a great point of flexibility.

The M series does amazing things which have their own merits, but the particular set of tradeoffs aren't inevitable.

The "sacrifices must be made" idea apparently sacrifices recall of other possibilities first.