I remember in 2007, buying my first MacBook. It came with an enormous 2gb of RAM. I asked about upgrading it. The guy leaned in conspiratorially and told me that Apple’s RAM upgrades were a rip-off, and that I’d be better of buying it elsewhere. So I did, for half of what Apple were asking.
This is a grift that Apple have had for far too long, and there’s a part of me that’s convinced that their move to soldered RAM was to stop people upgrading after the fact more than it was about SOC efficiencies.
I will hold on to my upgradeable 2018 mac mini which I put 64gb into for as long as I can (which will likely be pretty long since RAM is the only bottleneck in most macs and 64gb makes everything instant), then I will probably leave the Apple ecosystem.
When the software ecosystem gets too old, slap Linux on it for a fresh lease of life. Did that with my old macbook pro back in the day. Got years more out of it.
Yeah I’ve had a lot of old Mac mini Linux servers around. Ran home assistant on it for years.