[sudhirj]

Huh. So they used to do this, but looking at the M series chips it seems like the architecture assumes the CPU-GPU-RAM are all on the same chip and hooked into each other, which enables zero copy. Someone more well versed in hardware could explain if this is even possible.

Expandable internal storage would be nice, yeah. But I get the sealed, very tightly packed chassis they’re going for.

[ffgjgf1]

> get the sealed, very tightly packed chassis they’re going for

The Dell XPS 17 is only 0.1 inch thicker yet has fully replaceable RAM and 2(!) m2 slots. I’m pretty sure what Apple is going for is maximizing profit margins over anything else..

[nobleach]

I have an XPS 15. And while I liked that I could bring my own SSD and RAM, the build quality is nowhere near a Macbook Pro... like not even in the same galaxy. I had to have it serviced multiple times within the first few weeks. It had to be sent to Texas, and when it returned, one WiFi antenna wouldn't plug into the card, and the light on the front was permanently broken. I could have demanded Dell fix it - and I'd have been even more weeks without my main work laptop. So, by pure numbers/specs? Sure. By real world quality, no way would I favor Dell.

[dijit]

The issue is often comparing apples (heh) to oranges.

I understand the desire for slotted RAM, but the major limiting factor for nearly 10 years was CPU support for more than 16G of RAM. I had 16G of ram in 2011 and it was only 2019 when Intels 9th Gen laptop CPUs started supporting more.

The Dell XPS 17 itself has so many issues that if it was a Macbook people would be chomping at the bit, including not having a reliable suspend and memory issues causing BSOD's. -- reliability of these devices, at least when it comes to memory, might actually be worse and cause a shorter lifespan than if it had been soldered.

Of course it always feels good to buy an underspecced machine and upgrade it a year later, which is what we're trading off.

But it's interesting that we don't seem to have taken issue with BGA CPU mounts in laptops but we did for memory, I think this might be because Apple was one of the first to do it - and we feel a certain way when Apple limits us but not when other companies do.

[angoragoats]

There’s a lot of flat-out wrong information in this post. For one, even the low-power (U-series) Intel laptop CPUs have suported 32GB+ of memory since at least the 6th generation[1]. Many machines based on these CPUs unofficially support more than that. I have a Thinkpad with an i7-8550u and 64GB of DDR4, and it runs great.

On top of that, the higher-power laptop SKUs have supported 64gb or more since that time as well.

Secondly, it’s silly to claim that having RAM slots somehow makes a computer inherently more unstable. Typically these types of issues are the result of the manufacturer of the machine having bugs in the BIOS/EFI implementation, which are exacerbated by certain brands/types of memory. If you don’t want to mess around with figuring that stuff out, most manufacturers publish a list of officially-tested RAM modules which are not always the cheapest in absolute terms, but are always night-and-day cheaper than Apple’s ridiculous memory pricing.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/88190/i...

[dijit]

Sorry, you're entirely mistaken, there is no business laptop that you could reasonably buy with more than 16G of RAM. I know because I had to buy a high end workstation laptop (Dell Precision 5520 FWIW) because no other laptop was supporting more than 16G of RAM in a thin chassis.

No Dell Latitude, Elitebook, Thinkpad X/T-series or even Fujitsu lifebook supported a CPU that was permitting greater than 16GiB of memory.

I know this because it was something I was looking at intently at the time and was very happy when the restrictions were lifted for commercially viable laptop SKUs.

Citing that something exists predisposes the notion of availability and functionality. No sane person is going to be rocking into the room with a Precision 7520 and calling it portable. The thing could be used as a weapon and not much else if you had no power source for more than 2hrs.

Also, socketed anything definitely increases material reliability. I ship desktop PC's internationally pretty often and the movement of shipping unseats components quite easily even with good packing.

I'm talking as if I'm against socketed components, I'm not, but don't pretend there's no downsides and infinite upgrade as an upside, it's disingenuous, in my experience there are some minor reliability issues (XPS17 being an exceptional case and one I was using to illustrate that sometimes we cherry pick what one manufacturer is doing with the belief that there were no trade offs to get there) and some limitations on the hardware side that limit your upgrade potential outside of being soldered.

[angoragoats]

> Sorry, you're entirely mistaken, there is no business laptop that you could reasonably buy with more than 16G of RAM.

> No Dell Latitude, Elitebook, Thinkpad X/T-series or even Fujitsu lifebook supported a CPU that was permitting greater than 16GiB of memory.

Here are the Lenovo PSRef specs for the Thinkpad T470, which clearly states 32GB as the officially-supported maximum, using a 6th or 7th gen CPU:

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...

This is not a behemoth of a laptop; I'm writing this on a T480 right now, which supports 32GB officially and 64GB unofficially, and it weighs 4lbs with the high-capacity battery (the same as the T470).

I can't tell if you're trolling or what, but if you're serious, you clearly didn't look hard enough.

Edit: since you mentioned Latitudes, Elitebooks, and Fujitsu lifebooks:

- Dell Latitude 7480 (6th gen CPUs) officially supports 32GB: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/latitude-14-7480-...

- HP Elitebook 840 G3 (6th gen CPUs) officially supports 32GB: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05259054

- For Lifebooks, I couldn't find an older one that supported 32GB, but this U937 uses 7th gen CPUs, and has 4GB soldered and one DIMM slot which supports up to 16GB. This is a total of 20GB, again, breaking the 16GB barrier: https://www.fujitsu.com/tw/Images/ds-LIFEBOOK%20U937.pdf

I believe these are all 14"-class laptops that weigh under 4 pounds.

[angoragoats]

One more thought: you might be getting confused here with the LPDDR3 limitation, which was a legit thing that existed until the timeframe you're thinking of.

Any laptop which used LPDDR3 (soldered) typically maxed out at 16GB, but as far as I'm aware, this was due to capacity limitations of the RAM chips, not anything to do with the CPUs. For example, the Lenovo X1 Carbon had a 16GB upper limit for a while due to this. I believe the 15" MacBook Pro had the same limitation until moving to DDR4. But this is entirely the result of a design decision on the part of the laptop manufacturer, not the CPU, and as I've shown there were plenty of laptops out there in the ~2014-2016 timeframe which supported 32GB or more.

[wtallis]

Intel actually has this documented all on one page: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

DDR4 support was introduced with the 6th gen Core (except Core m) in 2016, LPDDR4 support didn't show up until (half of) the 10th gen lineup in 2019. It's just another aspect of their post-Skylake disaster, wherein they kept shipping the same stuff under new names for years on end before finally getting 10nm usable enough for some laptop processors, then a few years later getting it working well enough for desktop processors. In the meantime, they spent years not even trying to design a new memory PHY for the 14nm process that actually worked.

[strangetortoise]

They haven't made slotted ram or storage on their macbooks since 2012 (retina macbooks removed the slotted ram afaik). It might save on thickness, but I'm not buying the slim chasses argument being the only reason, since they happily made their devices thicker for the M series cpus.

[pbmonster]

> It might save on thickness, but I'm not buying the slim chasses argument being the only reason

Soldered memory allows higher bus frequency much, much easier. From a high frequency perspective, the slots are a nightmare.

[Jetrel]

It's not soldered. It used to be, but ever since the M1, it's in-CPU. The ram is actually part of the CPU die.

Needless to say it has batshit insane implications for memory bandwidth.

I've got an M1, and the load time for apps is absolutely fucking insane by comparison to my iMac; there's at least one AAA game whose loading time dropped from about 5 minutes on my quad-core intel, to 5 seconds on my mac studio.

There's just a shitload of text-processing and compiling going on any time a large game gets launched. It's been incredibly good for compiling C++ and Node apps, as well.

[redeeman]

the ram is not on die, and 5 min to 5 sec is obviously due to other things, if legit

[thirdsun]

Sounds like the iMac had spinning hard disks rather than SSD storage.

[pdpi]

Yup. I’ve been looking at the Framework laptop, and it’s barely any thicker than the current MacBook Pro.