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by foldr 2214 days ago
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?
1 comments
Spooky23 2214 days ago
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.

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foldr 2213 days ago
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.

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