[kojoru]

> There's no technical reason, other than thinness, for the way Dell soldered the RAM down, for instance.

That's a sentiment that's been repeated a lot, and it's not fully true.

One important property that soldered-on RAM has is increased security. There's been a demonstrably practical way to break full-disk encryption with physical access to a turned on or sleeping computer by re-attaching the memory quickly to another computer. The keys then can be read from the memory.

That's not a vector you have anymore if the memory is not removable.

[collsni]

What type of data are we putting on these laptops? Nuclear keys?

Good security balances practicality. In my opinion that's a bad argument..

This is to save space, and is impactful to the longevity of the hardware and environment.

[mulmen]

It’s impactful but in what direction? How many repairable or upgradeable laptops actually got repairs and upgrades? Or was it just wasted material and energy in production?

I don’t have the answer but these things can be surprising.

[dsr_]

None of the unreparable laptops get repaired.

None of the unupgradable laptops get upgraded.

Some of the reparable, upgradable laptops get upgraded and/or repaired.

Every corporate IT organization I've ever talked to wants to be able to swap batteries, RAM and disks, and if they're easy enough, keyboards. They'd really prefer if the user could be sent a screwdriver and a replacement for batteries and RAM.

[mulmen]

Ok but does the repairability always justify the added material and manufacturing cost? Especially in a consumer application.

I love my old repairable Thinkpad but I have been on the same MacBook Pro for 8 years now with zero repairs.

[tarlinian]

The more important reason this is not true is that there is technically feasible DIMM form factor for LPDDR4/4x/5/5x RAM. And there are actual power savings (~20% reduction in J/bit transferred) to be had for using LPDDR RAM as opposed to similar generation DDR RAM. Laptops that support replaceable memory have to use DDR4/DDR5 and therefore cannot take advantage of the power savings you get from LPDDR4/4x memory.

[lostgame]

No amount of security or performance benefits can outweigh even the environmental/eWaste disaster alone that non-upgradable RAM chips/storage and lack of user replaceable batteries are responsible for.

Then there’s the cost thing. Have 8GB of RAM in your MacBook and want 16GB? Whoa, boy; that’ll cost you. That old computer’s pretty useless now, and we go right back to the eWaste problem.

Soldered RAM/storage/batteries are the epitome of greed in technology.

They prioritized the customer purchasing a whole new product over simply upgrading one component; creating a literal never-ending shit-stream of eWaste and products increasingly designed to stay properly functional for less time.

The law chases them; and instead of getting the message and smartening up; they find loopholes to get out of it.

There’s no excuse. It’s greed.

EDIT: More importantly - can we please stop making excuses for these greedy assholes, and start collectively working on change?

We need to start focusing on the planet, and this is a super easy start.

[scarface74]

So do you throw away perfectly good laptops - creating e waste - instead of just selling them and using the money to buy a new one?

[lostgame]

The problem is that because they can't be upgraded, they are no longer 'perfectly good'.

I recently was donated a 2010 MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM, and a paltry 128GB SSD.

What the hell is anyone supposed to do with that?! If the RAM wasn't soldered to the board I could probably at least upgrade it to 8GB and someone could at least use it for email and Facebook.

So I don't really get your point.

My original point is that these laptops are not perfectly good anymore - but if I could pop that 2010 Air with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, it could be useful for someone. A student, maybe. Boot it with Windows and you'd probably even be able to run a more recent OS.

[scarface74]

I have an old Dell Laptop from 2010 (Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz) with 4GB of RAM that ran Windows 10 as a Plex Server for years. With Macs of that era, you could stick a Windows 10 DVD and install it without any issues.

Pre-Covid (2019), my mom was using my old 2006 era Mac Mini with 1.25 GB of RAM running Windows 7 when she use to tutor. It was good enough to run Chrome and access Google Docs.

A 2010 laptop isn’t “perfectly good”. If the only reason you needed to upgrade to a Mac that was running a supported operating system was because you needed more RAM, you could get money back by selling it. The resell value of a 2010 MacBook - or any other computer is practically nil.

[devit]

The proper solution to that is to use a CPU that supports encrypting RAM.

Soldering RAM does nothing since you can still, at least in principle, reattach it to another device.

[Teever]

Do you actually believe that this issue was discussed at all in any way by the engineers that Dell contracted to design this laptop?

Like do you actually think it was a factor at all in any way?