Step 1) Initiate downvotes Step 2) Allow echo chamber to form Step 3) Do nothing as people leave echo chamber Step 4) lol ware'd evry1 go??? Step 5) Remove downvotes Step 6) Hope crowd wanders back in

No taxes.

These prices are ridiculously h-

"design agency in San Francisco"

These prices are pretty accurate.

Why can't someone design and build something that just works. :-(

What machine are you using? I was checking out the HP Envy 34 AIO.

You're right about the frustration part. But it isn't solely due to this machine. I am also frustrated with the purposeful decision making on Apple's end to lock things down to the point that these machines are disposable.

Can you think of any logical reason why I would not be able to easily open up basically any computer and swap out the hard drive? I used to be able to just grab the handle on my G4 and do whatever I wanted. Memory, HD upgrades, optical drive swaps, graphics card... You could even upgrade the CPU with minimal difficulty. AND the machine was freaking beautiful.

Now... everything is soldered and glued... and here comes the T2 chip as the final nail in the coffin for ever doing ANYTHING yourself. Why? So I can have a featureless slab of aluminum that's a little bit thinner (at the edges)? I'm not buying it. I think this stuff is being intentionally done so that when something goes wrong with this computer I simply have to throw it out and buy a new one.

Combine all of that with manufacturing and software development quality assurance processes that seem to be devolving at an exponential rate, and you're paying a premium for something that is so prone to catastrophic failure that it seems like it is purposefully so.

I ran every diagnostic they have and there are zero hardware issues detected.

This.

I hear you. There was a lot of built-up frustration in the OP. I'm trying the external SSD route and hopefully that helps. The more I think about it, the more I think this has to do with the new format being optimized for SSD but being used on a fusion drive.

Either way, at the moment, the only thing keeping me in the ecosystem is MacOS itself. The hardware looks nice, but with a buggy OS the performance just isn't there to justify the premium.

Splitting the internal fusion is a heck of an idea. The SSD portion is 256GB on this so that would make for a great scratch disk. Thanks for the input.