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by lamontcg 1697 days ago
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.

1 comments

The benefits provided by SoCs outweigh the benefits of user upgradeable RAM for me.

> Swapping batteries due to charge issues was never particularly important to the majority of consumers and is a red herring.

Why?

>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.

You say that like those are somehow mutually exclusive.
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.
I'd love to see less passive/aggressive responses, but this is the internet...

Editing images and video comes to mind. Average users are doing that a lot more, since they have access to high resolution RAW output via mobile devices that struggle less than their desktop to cope with the throughput.

> I'd love to see less passive/aggressive responses, but this is the internet...

You're the guy who decided to drag this argument off onto the soapbox that you wanted to talk about that I never cared about. I wrote you off from the tone of your first response... because this is the internet...