Look, I'm going to be honest with you.
I sat down here to break down a 9to5Mac story about a YouTuber who did a 1TB upgrade on the new MacBook Neo and filmed an ASMR video of the process. Sounds interesting, right? A guy with skin in the game, cracking open an Apple laptop — one Apple doesn't want you to open — and showing you how it's done.
But you know what Google News actually served me?
A goddamn cookie consent page. That's right. The entire content that was supposed to be there was, in reality, a wall of "Accept All," "Reject All," language selection in 47 languages, and a link to a privacy policy.
Welcome to digital journalism in 2025.
The circus of middlemen
This right here is a perfect metaphor for the financial markets, and that's why I'm writing about a MacBook on a finance site. Pay attention.
You've got a real product (the news story). You've got an interested consumer (you, me). And standing in the way, there's a grotesque layer of middlemen — platforms, algorithms, trackers, regulatory consent forms — that turn something simple into something completely inaccessible.
Know what this reminds me of? The mutual fund industry in Brazil.
You want to invest. The asset is right there. But between you and your money actually earning a return, there's the management fee, the performance fee, the semi-annual tax bite, the platform charging custody fees, the advisor pushing whatever product pays him the fattest commission, and the SEC equivalent with 400 pages of regulation nobody reads.
At the end of the day, you're staring at a consent screen while the asset compounds on the other side of the wall.
Apple, right-to-repair, and what this has to do with your investments
Now, from what we know about the original story — because I went digging through other channels, like any decent investor should do instead of trusting a single source — the YouTuber managed to swap the MacBook Neo's SSD to 1TB. This matters because Apple has historically soldered components to the motherboard specifically to force you into buying the pricier factory configuration or paying through the nose for authorized repairs.
It's Apple's business model in its purest form: total ecosystem control and maximum value extraction from the customer.
Know who else does this? Traditional big banks.
They lock you into service bundles. They charge you for account portability. They make it a pain in the ass to leave. They create technical barriers that are, in practice, profitability barriers for them.
When a YouTuber cracks open a MacBook and shows you can do the upgrade yourself, he's doing the digital equivalent of the guy who pulls his money out of a savings account at Big Bank and throws it into Treasury bonds. He's breaking the monopoly of ignorance.
The real problem: the content that never arrives
But here's the irony that stings.
The story about a guy democratizing hardware access was blocked by a layer of digital bureaucracy that exists, theoretically, to "protect" you. Just like half the regulations in the financial markets exist, theoretically, to "protect the small investor" — but in practice protect the big players from having to actually compete.
Nassim Taleb would say: whoever designed that cookie page has no skin in the game. They lose nothing if you never read the article. The platform already captured your click, already logged your visit, already monetized your attention — without delivering a single thing.
It's the perfect model of zero value with maximum extraction. Every rent-seeker's wet dream.
So what do you do with this?
Next time someone shows you "exclusive content" behind a paywall, a consent screen, or some financial guru's sales funnel, ask yourself:
Is the middleman delivering me value, or is he charging me a toll on a road that should be free?
Because at the end of the day, in both the tech world and the investment world, the greatest skill you can develop is the ability to go straight to the source — and tell the circus of middlemen to shove it where the cookie don't shine.
