What is the use case? Modern batteries hold their charge for a long time. In a review I saw today, the reviewer - a professional photographer and filmmaker no less - said that he managed to shoot edit and export a video on a single charge[0]. The need to swap out batteries with these device has all but disappeared, save for permanent replacement.
The use case is the ability to easily replace/upgrade the batteries, RAM and drives by the end consumer without requiring any specialized tools or procedures barring removing some screws.
This is what we used to have with laptops 10+ years ago.
Swapping batteries due to charge issues was never particularly important to the majority of consumers and is a red herring.
>The benefits provided by SoCs outweigh the benefits of user upgradeable RAM for me.
And 90% of laptop users. Utility of computer upgrades for most people’s needs stagnated 5 to even 10 years ago. I think the last big material improvement before M1 for regular consumers was SSD replacing HDD.
They kind of are by definition - System on a Chip. I'll rephrase; the benefits of having on-package RAM (unified would be even better!) outweigh the benefits of user-upgradable RAM. User upgradable/appendable storage is another thing entirely.
The _only_ real benefits of on-package RAM are cost and forcing planned obsolescence. You get maybe 0.2ns latency difference by not laying out ram socket next to CPU.
Please show me a workload constrained by memory latency/bandwidth on MacOS. I'd really love to see how those benchmarks turn out so the average user can decide for themselves.
Just noting an alternative use case: When I used to take my laptop (a Dell XPS M1530, later a Dell Studio XPS 13) on my walk between home and university, I'd take it without the battery in as that made it much lighter. There were power points where I was going anyway.
[0]https://youtu.be/I10WMJV96ns?t=643