> I don't think you can get a mass market SSD that does what this thing does.

Of course, if you started with the requirements that is has to be the exact same thing you cannot meet it, precisely because what Apple does is highly proprietary and dependent on their implementation of the controller and the encryption that is handled by their own silicon.

However, the fact is that there are SSDs that are faster than what Apple provides and there are also CPUs that are better at encryption or just competitive enough with what Apple does. You can't get a 1-to-1 solution because that a not something anyone actually desires but you can get a solution that is just as good if not better.

It is always weird to me that when it comes to Apple people want to go with the arbitrary requirements they dictated while dismissing any requirement of another competing solution, like modularity.

> First of all, I highly doubt Apple gives a shit. Their model of lock-in is making a better combined experience than the competition

What you say makes no sense and is highly contradictory in its nature.
They charge the price they do for upgrades because there is literally no other way to do so. The reason they don't use some random WD SSD is precisely because if they would it would be trivial for anyone to bypass their predatory pricing and very few would actually use their upgrade options and they definitely could not realistically extract so much money from their power users.
It's completely crazy that you believe otherwise even though they started soldering SSD/RAM on the Intel MacBooks, way before there was any technical rationalization about it (in marketing and by their fans).

The reason they do it is because of money; any other benefits are just a side effect.
They get to save money from the vertical integration: suddenly they don't have to pay for a 3rd party integration of controller and software development (with the associated markup) and they go down the value chain, just buying NAND chips which are a lower value commodity with less supplier power. Since they already pay for their own silicon, the added cost of the controller on the silicon is minimal.
And they get to dictate the price of storage/RAM upgrades since they become by definition their own supplier with no competition.

If they really wanted, they could have a solution that would allow their own custom NAND board and also support 3rd party SSDs for anyone who wanted (even if it would have some downsides). The added development cost would be minimal but of course they would never do that because realistically almost nobody would spend 3-4 times as much on storage no matter how much better their solution would be in theory.

When it comes to the lock-in, it is completely built into the software. They get to win because once people get used to and dependent on a particular software stack it is pretty costly to switch to another solution. And the cost is one of the things people hate the most: it is time and struggle to learn/adapt to new way of doing things. If you have been working a certain way for a very long time you also need to unlearn a good amount of it, which is a struggle (think about changing keyboard layout for example). Most people are not ready to pay this cost so they end up preferring to pay with cash because in the end they got the cash by selling their time and they find it is more efficient for them to go this route.
And this is a fact Apple knows very well, in fact most of the Apple customers (at least when it comes to the Mac) are people who were wealthy enough to afford their hardware in the first place, those are people who generally have a large leverage on their time, meaning they have a great multiplier which is precisely why Apple feel that they can get away with this anticompetitive behavior and they are completely right.

That doesn't make any of it better, it is still highly abusive and extortionate behavior which is funny because it is a company that markets itself as highly virtuous. All the while they extract more money out of economies all other the place, in a way that is highly inefficient for society because they don't give back anything and the value they provide is highly out of whack with what they extract.

As for the carrot, there is some of it left but it has become very rotten. They make really nice hardware that's for sure, and the recent development of Apple Silicon has brough much needed value (if you don't care about compatibility outside of Apple focused software that is).
But the reality is that outside of their base model that offer decent value, because of the cost of upgrades they wouldn't sell that much hardware if macOS could run on other hardware legally and without too much effort.
Hackintosh would never have been a thing otherwise and we know that for a fact because historically when they licensed Mac OS to clone, their hardware sales tanked and then they later came with various technical mitigation to make it too costly to legally make a clone.

So, in a way I agree that there is good part of a carrot left but that's mostly if you can be happy with their base default configuration, if you have a requirement outside of that their pricing make it so that the carrot leaves a very bad taste in your mouth and you wish you could go another route even if it meant having to compromise on some other stuff.