[foldr]

The alternative is to make the laptops bulkier, heavier and less energy efficient for the tiny number of people who want to upgrade their RAM.

It's not as trivial as people think to switch to removable RAM. See e.g. this informative reddit comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2dyuxa/can_any_engin...

The rest of the thread is also worth a read.

[Spooky23]

That's nonsense.

We replaced most of MacBooks last year when we got sick of waiting for a non-defective keyboard and maintaining a spare pool of $3000 laptops. The thin models use soldered memory, but are priced at a much lower margin. The slightly thicker models are still thinner and lighter than the MacBook Pros they replaced, and have user replaceable memory as well. In most cases, we just ordered more memory because HP doesn't gouge you, and our budget was built around MacBooks.

There was some grousing initially about leaving MacOS for Windows 10, but it went away fairly quickly, as Catalina really fubared stuff that our Mac users cared about around the same time, running MacOS in a business sucks anyway, and the Windows 10 linux stuff is good enough for our folks who were using a Mac for Unixy reasons.

Apple's thin and light principles make sense and are ultimately correct from a technical POV, but the business side uses it as a margin mining operation. 2020 isn't 2010 from a competitive POV, where Apple blew everyone away -- they lost focus in the 2014-15 timeframe and now focus on the ARM transition. Today, competitive forces drive thin & light among other vendors and ultimately result in a better outcome for most scenarios.

[foldr]

The following points are not nonsense:

1) RAM slots take up more space.

2) There is not a standard socket for all kinds of RAM (particularly some kinds of energy efficient RAM).

Which thin non-Apple laptop are you referring to?

I seriously doubt Apple gives a crap about whether or not people can upgrade their RAM. Hardly anyone does it even when they can, so it can't make much difference to their business model. Do you really think Apple are doing this so that a tiny fraction of people who would have just upgraded their RAM buy a new laptop instead?

[Spooky23]

The thin one is the x360, I don’t recall the other one — I don’t need more than 16GB.

I’m sure Apple doesn’t care at all — they removed the iMac memory slots and made storage replacement impossible for no real good reason at all as well. That combined with the gouging for additional capacity and the borderline fraud of shipping the defective keyboard for years was enough for me.

I liked MacOS a lot, but the companies behavior is a textbook example of why you need competitive forces in hardware.

[foldr]

The x360 is not thinner than a 13 inch MacBook Pro (1.58cm vs 1.56cm, according to the manufacturers). And according to the following data sheet, the LDDR-3 memory on the x360 is soldered onto the board: https://www8.hp.com/h20195/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4aa7-6087eee

Soldering on ultrafast SSDs does make sense for a number of reasons beyond just saving space. The higher the bandwidth, the more difficult it is to get data transfer working reliably when part of the electrical connection is made via a connector cable. Apple have some of the fastest SSD speeds out there.

There are similar issues with RAM. There's lots of crappy RAM on the market. If people started putting third party RAM in modern MacBooks, you'd get lots of issues with e.g. reliable suspend/resume. Some good discussion here: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-valid-technical-reason-for-....

The laptop options that are hyped up as being better than Apple almost always turn out to have a mythical element, on further investigation. If you want removable RAM and SSDs you can get them (yay free market!), but there's a real downside.

[timw4mail]

A tradeoff I'll take every time.

[foldr]

Apple has pretty much always placed an emphasis on compact (by the standards of the day) form factors for its laptops. Just buy from another manufacturer if that's not your thing. History has usually proved them correct. People used to complain about the lack of a CD drive.