[threeseed]

Would add to the other comments that having sockets increases the thickness of the device.

Now you can argue that you wouldn't make this trade-off but for others including myself it is the right decision. For most people, including professionals, RAM is no longer the bottleneck for system performance.

[blacksmith_tb]

I don't think the Mac Mini's case has gotten any thinner in spite of having soldered RAM. The M1 says it's 3.6cm thick, while my old intel mini is 3cm exactly, in spite of having socketed DIMMs (I upgraded it to 32GB, which was slightly harder than I expected, but manageable).