[sva_]

> That said, I have verified exactly one bad stick of RAM in over 3 decades of computing, so I personally think the downside of soldered RAM is overblown.

Man I must've been unlucky. I had a dead DDR stick around 10 years back and LPDDR (soldered on a ThinkPad x1) die on me around 6 years ago. Both of them died very early on though and were covered by warranty.

[m-p-3]

I had to send some bad RAM under warranty as well. Another upside with socketed RAM is that I was able to buy a small stick of RAM and get my machine going (although with constrained memory) until I received the new pair, which was a minor inconvenience.

Having soldered RAM would have meant shipping the entire system back, then find a spare system and the trouble of setting up all my softwares until then.