This has been the case for years now, and other manufacturers are following the same trend. I'm starting to find that I rarely upgrade things anyway because by

This has been the case for years now, and other manufacturers are following the same trend. I'm starting to find that I rarely upgrade things anyway because by the time I need to upgrade, things like the CPU might be too slow anyway, or ports have drifted away to USB-X and Thunderbolt 12 and the whole device falls behind. I say this as the owner of a maxed out Thinkpad X1 Yoga 1st gen. I tend to buy used top of the line and forget about upgrades. The ram is soldered in this one as well, but I can change SSDs and WiFi cards, which is very nice. It's been running MacOS Catalina for more than a year now and rock solid stable, so basically a $300 i7, 16GBRAM /512GBSSD 1440p 14in Macbook that is lighter than the 13in Pro. The cons are the damn speakers, if this thing had good speakers I wouldn't even consider a Macbook.