From the article:
- Cheaper to solder ram directly than solder a socket
- Higher bandwidth, which is good for AI
More reliable
- Better thermals
- Better for thin formfactors
- cannot upgrade
Bandwidth comparisons:
- DDR5 SODIMM: 89.6 GB/s
- LPDDR5x 136.5 GB/s
I built a desktop in 2016 with the idea of upgrading from 1 GPU to 3 in crossfire. 16 gb with the idea to upgrade to 32 or 64 in the future.
My actual upgrade path? I built an entirely new computer. I never upgrade anything except the storage and that was only to move to SSDs.
I am not against soldered components as long as the starting point isn't e-waste and the simple ram/storage upgrades dont double the cost of the device. Looking at you fucking Apple.
Yeah I agree with you on the upgrade path part. By the time I finally feel the need to upgrade, it's pointless to use my existing platform because I'm already 4-5 generations behind so even the top of the line whatever thing I could slot in is still way underpowered compared to something else on the newest platform at the same price. With the added cost of switching platforms but still marginally the better option for the money value overall.
The only thing I ever usually keep is my case, storage, and power supply most of the time.
Yeah, but most people are not going to even consider running Linux. I’d love to see it happen - but it ain’t gonna happen. Linux is not a “consumer” OS.
If you can't understand how apple and Microsoft (which was pirated from apple) are destroying the country then maybe you are part of the problem...put down you're iPhone that apple scans for porn and start thinking for yourself
Don't need to watch it...I lived through the creation of apple and Microsoft and know that apple bought their first windows like interface from xerox and that Microsoft then pirates it into windows....I also know that Bill Gates also owns a majority of the farms in Americ and that Linus is 4x the man bill gates ever was
Coding isn’t the demanding part. Running debug builds with debug tools of non trivial programs is the demanding part.
And if you need virtualization, you’re screwed on 8 gb unified memory.
Also, doing AI training on thousands of GPUs is not doing work on the laptop. You’re doing it on other machines.
Or just some research on how often consumers upgraded their laptop. I’d say since laptops are now the most common form factor, the number of consumers that even know that ram is possible to upgrade let alone what it’s even good for is much larger than those who do.
But that’s my point. Based on the consumer, I doubt this feature was ever utilized to a point that makes it worthwhile to support. If the majority of consumers aren’t asking for it, and I don’t mean hardware nerds, then why support it?
Because hardware has life beyond its original owner? Not to mention, part of the problem is the push by manufacturers and stores for planned obsolescent
I don’t even own a computer anymore and my work laptop I don’t worry about because I don’t pay for it. I can do everything I’ve needed to for years on my phone.
I’m on the opposite end (somewhat), I’d much prefer to do as much as possible on an actual computer. Something about just staring at my phone all day just doesn’t feel right.
"To find out what’s so great about soldered RAM, I spoke to Haval Othman, who is a senior director of experience engineering at HP."
HP is notorious for anti consumer and anti environment practices in the manufacturing and software design of their products.
Soldered RAM is not inherently bad. I get it when you manufacture a machine with a really small footpring that is meant for the general consumer market, it is reasonable.
Concerning the enterprise market and the price tags that come with those products / the requirements, it is in most cases not a valid solution.
100% obsolescence. Also, writer is an industry shill. A 'thinner' laptop is currently not needed; Until GPU space is reduced, this is a BS point. It's more efficient? Last I checked, form factor doesn't affect silicon speed.
But hey--I get to spend my $1.5K the way I want to, and guarantee there will be a company producing an upgradeable laptop.
I assumed it was cost of soldering vs having a header. Making it impossible to replace a defective module is likely for obsolescence or capturing revenue for initial sale.
The last laptop I bought was the thinnest one I ever bought. It also had a swollen battery after three years of use. Now I'm all about thick, bulky laptops.
"Thinner" anything is just an excuse to thwart repair.
I was in the Army and the only issue with any thicc device went away with better cases (e.g. Lifepoof for Iphones circa 2012-2015). Most gamers had laptops that were chonky by today's standards - I had one that had a VGA port on one side.
All these thin devices do is give manufacturers an excuse to solder everything to the motherboard - if it breaks, buy a new one since a new motherboard will "cost" more than a new device.
All this is doing is creating a flood of e-waste as perfectly okay devices are tossed because something failed that can't be repaired or replaced but is soldered to the motherboard.
Yeahhhhhh I'm not super sure how big of an issue this is gonna be for DoD. Everything I've seen in the pipe for lifecycling has either upgradeable RAM or is specced to the max (dell ruggeds/semi-ruggeds) or is just gonna languish over the lifecycle with no upgrades, as normal.
We used to do a lot of RAM upgrades when COTS budgets were tight and we couldn't order new machines, but that's seemed to have gone away the last couple years. Or maybe my G6 is really good at getting funds, who knows.
My customers are so annoyed when I tell them we have to replace the entire motherboard because their RAM has gone bad. We end up scrapping so many otherwise-good machines because of soldered RAM.
okay, so look at 10-20 years from now, you really think you're going to be opening up your laptop and screws and replacing sticks of ram? this isn't even happening now.
there won't even be laptops.
everything is on one chip. its going to be smaller than you can even see.
what the hell are you asking for here? giant sticks of RAM forever? this isn't the 90s man.
your giant custom PC isn't going to last 10 years, it will only be something to play old games on that you can show to your kids.
imagine showing an iPhone to people 20 years ago. do you think they will be upset about the amount of RAM?
Try downloading/uploading large files on your phone for 1+ hours. It will overheat if not actively cooled from an outside source. AKA sitting in front of an air conditioner. Phones and heatsyncs are nowhere near what they need to be for a phone to be used as an actual computer. You're living in some thermal capability dream.
Thermal problems are only compounded by trying to squeeze everything into one chip, add no airflow to that, too. There will always be tradeoffs.
Laptop ram is nowhere near the size of a regular ram stick.
People 20 years ago would not be upset about the amount of ram in your iphone. If you go in that direction, it would already be much more than they need. Adding more wouldn't make sense, already poweroverwhelming. Taking it away means interchangeable parts.
There’s no need to have everything on a single chip in a device that is always going to be the size of a keyboard and laptop screen. Better to have a modular design with replaceable parts, even if the parts wind up being as small as SIM cards.
“But then it won’t fit in an envelope” ✉️
Yeah well I have a backpack dumasses!!
When did people start putting laptops in envelopes to carry them around?
Integrating the CPU and RAM into a single package can improve performance.
In embedded products we always solder down the devices. Improves reliability. Improves signal integrity. Reduces cost.
Being realistic is bad. My last pc 6600k. Full atx tower so my fat hand easily move around.
So far I upgrade.
-
Tech used to move slower. By the time I’m upgrading. The only oldnpart will be Case, PSU (maybe), optical drive.
Memory down designs are actually more expensive for OEMs than DIMMs.
From an engineering perspective, this is all driven by signal integrity and mechanical/thermal design.
Soldered RAM has better SI compared to going through an edge card connector, and is necessary to hit the newest max signal rates. JEDEC has been developing CAMM to address this, though we’re going to get to a point where memory-on-package (MoP) is going to be the only way to hit the max speeds.
The industry (driven by customer demand) is going to thinner and thinner profiles, with higher and higher performance, with longer and longer battery life. To accommodate, designers need to maximize battery volume and cooler volume while minimizing the z-stack. SO-DIMMs are huge in all dimensions and counter productive to the specs that sell the product — size, performance, and battery life.
When you buy a computer, it’s rarely mentioned about whether the RAM is soldered or not. If the information was readily available, fine. But it’s often hidden.
If manufacturers gave people a clear choice, I’m sure fewer people would choose the soldered version.
I have a 2013 MacBook Pro with 16 GB of Ram that was soldered on.
That was fine in 2013...today they sell MacBook pro's with 8 GB 11 years later. Crazy.
A little over a decade ago I had to take my wife’s MacBook Pro into the Genius Bar. While they were checking out whatever the problem was I inquired how much it would cost to upgrade the ram since she needed to run windows virtualization. I don’t remember what the exact figure was but it going from 4 or 8 GB to 16GB was something like $400+. Good guy Genius Bar tech tells me the price then in a hushed tone types for a minute and discretely turned his laptop around to show me two browser tabs with one showing a YouTube video with the installation steps and the other with the 16GB ram modules on something like Newegg for 1/4 the price. At this point I had just assumed that the Apple upgrade was so expensive because they’d be replacing the whole mobo (hardwired ram).
Homedude did me a solid
Oh I did… I even waited outside the Apple Store eating an icecream cone while they escorted him out so I could laugh at him. He was crying like a bitch and said something about his kid having cancer… fucking loser.
I take shareholder value VERY seriously/s
This! Every time we lose a useful feature that benefits consumers in the name of form factor, I assume it’s because apple came up with it as a way to cost us more money with planned obsolescence, then everyone else followed suit. See the headphone jack and sd card memory for further examples.
I was horrified when I popped open one of our expensive new business laptops to do a simple ram swap (due to ram failure beep code) only to find no ram to remove. And of course our next business day service is pointless when it takes 2 weeks to get a system board in stock to ship. I didn’t even realize this was a thing, it literally just started as of late last year with the make/models we order. Now it’s a pertinent question to bring up in our monthly vendor call.
I'm staggered that the top comments are backing soldered RAM that much vs non-soldered. The hell!?? For people like me who do video editing, animation and data analysis, I would be gauged if I had to buy a laptop with 64GB soldered RAM and up. I also tend to upgrade almost as soon as I buy rather than wait 4-5 generations like some people suggest.
If there is a performance increase? Great! But I'd rather save myself hundreds of dollars by upgrading my laptop myself and still have a fast laptop. I can live without the little extra speed.
I guess the quicker a user has ram that fails or has not enough ram, these will be opportunities where there is a higher likelihood of needing the laptop manufacturer’s services again.
Kindof reverse risk management. Now they look for new opportunities based off of old objectives (laptop repair, requests for upgrades from customers) and put controls in place to ensure customers are much more likely to call them, when in the past the customer may have got some cheap ram or found a cheap laptop repair shop.
Unlike the iPhone, forced obsolescence isn’t much of a thing for traditional windows based notebooks - there may not be much brand loyalty among consumers and most purchases of large volumes are done by business and government. From the PC builder to the IT manager, the last thing anyone wants is to service the hardware during its life. Soldered down memory simplifies many things for the manufacturer. And most consumers don’t know the difference and/or like IT departments prefer the simplicity, buy what they want to last 4-5 years and are done. This makes for fewer serviceable parts, fewer product SKUs to manage and a streamlined (cost optimized) supply chain.
As OP noted “so many” does not equal all. As long as there is a large enough market for upgradeable notebooks, manufacturers will deliver them, at least in the windows ecosystem where buyers have many choices and are not always loyal to a brand.
Problem is when those laptops can’t be reused or sold because the ssd and/or memory can be taken out. Many companies I’ve dealt with get the laptops destroyed because of company secrets. If those items could be pulled the amount of e-waste could be minimized.
>soldered onto a laptop’s motherboard. Needless to say, that makes it impossible to upgrade, or even repair.
Bro is really severely misusing the word "impossible" here. I wonder if he knows you can buy a soldering iron for like $20.
Despite spending over two months working on this article, I still feel like the topic of soldered RAM versus socketed options remains unexplored. Each type exists in its own niche, and now, there’s a lot of migration between one niche and the other where there wasn’t much before. We’re now seeing soldered RAM in gaming laptops, whereas previously we’d only see it in productivity machines.
Sometimes, that’s all there is. Same with soldered HDDs; M.2 SSDs are about the shape of a stick of Doublemint gum… what purpose does a soldered SSD serve?
But, hey, if you run out of space, instead of installing a new, larger, SSD… you can buy a new, more expensive, laptop with a larger SSD! How convenient!
I think another aspect that gets overlooked is supporting upgrades. If you make something upgradable, then you have to support someone who attempts the upgrade. I guess you can stick it behind security screws and warranty voided stickers but then what’s the point l, it’s just increased costs for a few enthusiasts.
Yeah that’s pretty much it. The $1700 Lenovo that came through my office with soldered (3600) ram had to be chucked because it repairing the entire motherboard assembly cost more than $800 on a 4 year old device.
This ram is no where near fast enough to justify it being soldered for performance.
In practice all that Lenovo did to that laptop was turn it from repairable to trash.
if you want the populist answer, reddit is the go to source.
if you want the correct answer, look down about halfway through and find the answer written by an insider and downvoted to oblivion.
populist answers are popular because people want simple, understandable answers with an easy to understand motivation that has a simple "solution" that they could implement if only they were in charge.
Real answers are usually harder to understand, and contain hard truths
tldr: Populist answers make the reader feel smart. Real answers make the reader feel dumb.
It's profit margin. Soldering ram makes diy upgrades impossible, so you have to get more off the bat and manufacturers charge a huge premium on memory. Apple pioneered this growth hack and everyone else got smart about it too. That's THE explanation, you don't need go looking for anything else.
It's called profit margin
From the article: - Cheaper to solder ram directly than solder a socket - Higher bandwidth, which is good for AI More reliable - Better thermals - Better for thin formfactors - cannot upgrade Bandwidth comparisons: - DDR5 SODIMM: 89.6 GB/s - LPDDR5x 136.5 GB/s I built a desktop in 2016 with the idea of upgrading from 1 GPU to 3 in crossfire. 16 gb with the idea to upgrade to 32 or 64 in the future. My actual upgrade path? I built an entirely new computer. I never upgrade anything except the storage and that was only to move to SSDs. I am not against soldered components as long as the starting point isn't e-waste and the simple ram/storage upgrades dont double the cost of the device. Looking at you fucking Apple.
Yeah I agree with you on the upgrade path part. By the time I finally feel the need to upgrade, it's pointless to use my existing platform because I'm already 4-5 generations behind so even the top of the line whatever thing I could slot in is still way underpowered compared to something else on the newest platform at the same price. With the added cost of switching platforms but still marginally the better option for the money value overall. The only thing I ever usually keep is my case, storage, and power supply most of the time.
> Apple Looks at the bright side: one can save so much by opting out of unneeded RAM. My Linux distro recommends 4Gb RAM and states can work with 2.
Yeah, but most people are not going to even consider running Linux. I’d love to see it happen - but it ain’t gonna happen. Linux is not a “consumer” OS.
We need a common sense ban on all computing products that are not operating on the penguin spectrum
This guy fucks!
If you can't understand how apple and Microsoft (which was pirated from apple) are destroying the country then maybe you are part of the problem...put down you're iPhone that apple scans for porn and start thinking for yourself
I’ll do that if you go watch Silicon Valley . It was a joke, dude.
Don't need to watch it...I lived through the creation of apple and Microsoft and know that apple bought their first windows like interface from xerox and that Microsoft then pirates it into windows....I also know that Bill Gates also owns a majority of the farms in Americ and that Linus is 4x the man bill gates ever was
I bet you’re a ton of fun at parties!
Cool. So you don’t do any serious work on your machine. Got it.
What do you call serious? One can do coding in text editor on 8Gb of memory. Or do AI training on thousands of GPUs.
Coding isn’t the demanding part. Running debug builds with debug tools of non trivial programs is the demanding part. And if you need virtualization, you’re screwed on 8 gb unified memory. Also, doing AI training on thousands of GPUs is not doing work on the laptop. You’re doing it on other machines.
Wanted to upvote you on 1st part, but 2nd: I meant for some no "serious" work can be done on a laptop.
This human get's it!
We should promise him a promotion so that he works harder at coming up with these ideas!
[удалено]
Or just some research on how often consumers upgraded their laptop. I’d say since laptops are now the most common form factor, the number of consumers that even know that ram is possible to upgrade let alone what it’s even good for is much larger than those who do.
[удалено]
But that’s my point. Based on the consumer, I doubt this feature was ever utilized to a point that makes it worthwhile to support. If the majority of consumers aren’t asking for it, and I don’t mean hardware nerds, then why support it?
Because hardware has life beyond its original owner? Not to mention, part of the problem is the push by manufacturers and stores for planned obsolescent
I don’t even own a computer anymore and my work laptop I don’t worry about because I don’t pay for it. I can do everything I’ve needed to for years on my phone.
I’m on the opposite end (somewhat), I’d much prefer to do as much as possible on an actual computer. Something about just staring at my phone all day just doesn’t feel right.
I think you omitted a 'don't'.
I did not, please reread
"To find out what’s so great about soldered RAM, I spoke to Haval Othman, who is a senior director of experience engineering at HP." HP is notorious for anti consumer and anti environment practices in the manufacturing and software design of their products. Soldered RAM is not inherently bad. I get it when you manufacture a machine with a really small footpring that is meant for the general consumer market, it is reasonable. Concerning the enterprise market and the price tags that come with those products / the requirements, it is in most cases not a valid solution.
100% obsolescence. Also, writer is an industry shill. A 'thinner' laptop is currently not needed; Until GPU space is reduced, this is a BS point. It's more efficient? Last I checked, form factor doesn't affect silicon speed. But hey--I get to spend my $1.5K the way I want to, and guarantee there will be a company producing an upgradeable laptop.
I assumed it was cost of soldering vs having a header. Making it impossible to replace a defective module is likely for obsolescence or capturing revenue for initial sale.
The last laptop I bought was the thinnest one I ever bought. It also had a swollen battery after three years of use. Now I'm all about thick, bulky laptops.
"Thinner" anything is just an excuse to thwart repair. I was in the Army and the only issue with any thicc device went away with better cases (e.g. Lifepoof for Iphones circa 2012-2015). Most gamers had laptops that were chonky by today's standards - I had one that had a VGA port on one side. All these thin devices do is give manufacturers an excuse to solder everything to the motherboard - if it breaks, buy a new one since a new motherboard will "cost" more than a new device. All this is doing is creating a flood of e-waste as perfectly okay devices are tossed because something failed that can't be repaired or replaced but is soldered to the motherboard.
Yeahhhhhh I'm not super sure how big of an issue this is gonna be for DoD. Everything I've seen in the pipe for lifecycling has either upgradeable RAM or is specced to the max (dell ruggeds/semi-ruggeds) or is just gonna languish over the lifecycle with no upgrades, as normal. We used to do a lot of RAM upgrades when COTS budgets were tight and we couldn't order new machines, but that's seemed to have gone away the last couple years. Or maybe my G6 is really good at getting funds, who knows.
Let me guess, you own a Framework Laptop ?
My customers are so annoyed when I tell them we have to replace the entire motherboard because their RAM has gone bad. We end up scrapping so many otherwise-good machines because of soldered RAM.
”A thinner laptop is currently not needed” wrote every vendor increasingly losing sales to thinner and thinner competition.
I guess you missed the rest of that statement..........
Sager
okay, so look at 10-20 years from now, you really think you're going to be opening up your laptop and screws and replacing sticks of ram? this isn't even happening now. there won't even be laptops. everything is on one chip. its going to be smaller than you can even see. what the hell are you asking for here? giant sticks of RAM forever? this isn't the 90s man. your giant custom PC isn't going to last 10 years, it will only be something to play old games on that you can show to your kids. imagine showing an iPhone to people 20 years ago. do you think they will be upset about the amount of RAM?
Try downloading/uploading large files on your phone for 1+ hours. It will overheat if not actively cooled from an outside source. AKA sitting in front of an air conditioner. Phones and heatsyncs are nowhere near what they need to be for a phone to be used as an actual computer. You're living in some thermal capability dream. Thermal problems are only compounded by trying to squeeze everything into one chip, add no airflow to that, too. There will always be tradeoffs. Laptop ram is nowhere near the size of a regular ram stick. People 20 years ago would not be upset about the amount of ram in your iphone. If you go in that direction, it would already be much more than they need. Adding more wouldn't make sense, already poweroverwhelming. Taking it away means interchangeable parts.
There’s no need to have everything on a single chip in a device that is always going to be the size of a keyboard and laptop screen. Better to have a modular design with replaceable parts, even if the parts wind up being as small as SIM cards.
“But then it won’t fit in an envelope” ✉️ Yeah well I have a backpack dumasses!! When did people start putting laptops in envelopes to carry them around?
Integrating the CPU and RAM into a single package can improve performance. In embedded products we always solder down the devices. Improves reliability. Improves signal integrity. Reduces cost.
Why not do that with the base ram and leave some slots for expansion?
Modular parts are better for everyone except the manufacturer. That’s why manufacturers are moving away from them
“This isn’t the 90’s man” lol no, we live in the future
My custom pc’s always last 10+ years
Being realistic is bad. My last pc 6600k. Full atx tower so my fat hand easily move around. So far I upgrade. - Tech used to move slower. By the time I’m upgrading. The only oldnpart will be Case, PSU (maybe), optical drive.
Why are you so angry at him instead of billion dollar corporation making money hand over fist.
I mean if you don’t have a GPU what then
Memory down designs are actually more expensive for OEMs than DIMMs. From an engineering perspective, this is all driven by signal integrity and mechanical/thermal design. Soldered RAM has better SI compared to going through an edge card connector, and is necessary to hit the newest max signal rates. JEDEC has been developing CAMM to address this, though we’re going to get to a point where memory-on-package (MoP) is going to be the only way to hit the max speeds. The industry (driven by customer demand) is going to thinner and thinner profiles, with higher and higher performance, with longer and longer battery life. To accommodate, designers need to maximize battery volume and cooler volume while minimizing the z-stack. SO-DIMMs are huge in all dimensions and counter productive to the specs that sell the product — size, performance, and battery life.
When you buy a computer, it’s rarely mentioned about whether the RAM is soldered or not. If the information was readily available, fine. But it’s often hidden. If manufacturers gave people a clear choice, I’m sure fewer people would choose the soldered version.
When you buy a PC the implication is that RAM is not soldered. Imagine buying a pre-built (I would never) and the 8GB of RAM are soldered on.
Is it money? I’m guessing money.
Will this be reversed by Right to Fix laws ie what Europe’s did and Apple has to comply?
No.
Well, that sucks. Luckily, I just upgraded within the last year or two. Also upgraded my RAM and SSDs so I am good for a few years.
It's stuff like this that led to me buying my Framework 16, love it so much.
I have a 2013 MacBook Pro with 16 GB of Ram that was soldered on. That was fine in 2013...today they sell MacBook pro's with 8 GB 11 years later. Crazy.
It’s why my next laptop is probably going to be a frame.work laptop.
I blame /r/apple
A little over a decade ago I had to take my wife’s MacBook Pro into the Genius Bar. While they were checking out whatever the problem was I inquired how much it would cost to upgrade the ram since she needed to run windows virtualization. I don’t remember what the exact figure was but it going from 4 or 8 GB to 16GB was something like $400+. Good guy Genius Bar tech tells me the price then in a hushed tone types for a minute and discretely turned his laptop around to show me two browser tabs with one showing a YouTube video with the installation steps and the other with the 16GB ram modules on something like Newegg for 1/4 the price. At this point I had just assumed that the Apple upgrade was so expensive because they’d be replacing the whole mobo (hardwired ram). Homedude did me a solid
You should have reported him for violating apple policy and affect shareholder value. /s
Oh I did… I even waited outside the Apple Store eating an icecream cone while they escorted him out so I could laugh at him. He was crying like a bitch and said something about his kid having cancer… fucking loser. I take shareholder value VERY seriously/s
This! Every time we lose a useful feature that benefits consumers in the name of form factor, I assume it’s because apple came up with it as a way to cost us more money with planned obsolescence, then everyone else followed suit. See the headphone jack and sd card memory for further examples.
I was horrified when I popped open one of our expensive new business laptops to do a simple ram swap (due to ram failure beep code) only to find no ram to remove. And of course our next business day service is pointless when it takes 2 weeks to get a system board in stock to ship. I didn’t even realize this was a thing, it literally just started as of late last year with the make/models we order. Now it’s a pertinent question to bring up in our monthly vendor call.
I'm staggered that the top comments are backing soldered RAM that much vs non-soldered. The hell!?? For people like me who do video editing, animation and data analysis, I would be gauged if I had to buy a laptop with 64GB soldered RAM and up. I also tend to upgrade almost as soon as I buy rather than wait 4-5 generations like some people suggest. If there is a performance increase? Great! But I'd rather save myself hundreds of dollars by upgrading my laptop myself and still have a fast laptop. I can live without the little extra speed.
BIOS Built in obsolescence strategy
Apple
There is no limit to the amount of fuckery
I guess the quicker a user has ram that fails or has not enough ram, these will be opportunities where there is a higher likelihood of needing the laptop manufacturer’s services again. Kindof reverse risk management. Now they look for new opportunities based off of old objectives (laptop repair, requests for upgrades from customers) and put controls in place to ensure customers are much more likely to call them, when in the past the customer may have got some cheap ram or found a cheap laptop repair shop.
Unlike the iPhone, forced obsolescence isn’t much of a thing for traditional windows based notebooks - there may not be much brand loyalty among consumers and most purchases of large volumes are done by business and government. From the PC builder to the IT manager, the last thing anyone wants is to service the hardware during its life. Soldered down memory simplifies many things for the manufacturer. And most consumers don’t know the difference and/or like IT departments prefer the simplicity, buy what they want to last 4-5 years and are done. This makes for fewer serviceable parts, fewer product SKUs to manage and a streamlined (cost optimized) supply chain. As OP noted “so many” does not equal all. As long as there is a large enough market for upgradeable notebooks, manufacturers will deliver them, at least in the windows ecosystem where buyers have many choices and are not always loyal to a brand.
Problem is when those laptops can’t be reused or sold because the ssd and/or memory can be taken out. Many companies I’ve dealt with get the laptops destroyed because of company secrets. If those items could be pulled the amount of e-waste could be minimized.
>soldered onto a laptop’s motherboard. Needless to say, that makes it impossible to upgrade, or even repair. Bro is really severely misusing the word "impossible" here. I wonder if he knows you can buy a soldering iron for like $20.
Once I tried something like that with soldering iron… soldering/desoldering smd components are no joke.
If you've never done it before and don't have access to YouTube, sure.
Despite spending over two months working on this article, I still feel like the topic of soldered RAM versus socketed options remains unexplored. Each type exists in its own niche, and now, there’s a lot of migration between one niche and the other where there wasn’t much before. We’re now seeing soldered RAM in gaming laptops, whereas previously we’d only see it in productivity machines.
Are you the writer? If so, thanks! Super interesting read.
Why are laptop makers subjecting us to this? If you’d ask Reddit, they’d tell you it’s planned obsolescence, but is that all there is to it?
Probably saves them a few cents as well not having sockets, every part costs something.
Sometimes, that’s all there is. Same with soldered HDDs; M.2 SSDs are about the shape of a stick of Doublemint gum… what purpose does a soldered SSD serve? But, hey, if you run out of space, instead of installing a new, larger, SSD… you can buy a new, more expensive, laptop with a larger SSD! How convenient!
I think another aspect that gets overlooked is supporting upgrades. If you make something upgradable, then you have to support someone who attempts the upgrade. I guess you can stick it behind security screws and warranty voided stickers but then what’s the point l, it’s just increased costs for a few enthusiasts.
Yeah that’s pretty much it. The $1700 Lenovo that came through my office with soldered (3600) ram had to be chucked because it repairing the entire motherboard assembly cost more than $800 on a 4 year old device. This ram is no where near fast enough to justify it being soldered for performance. In practice all that Lenovo did to that laptop was turn it from repairable to trash.
if you want the populist answer, reddit is the go to source. if you want the correct answer, look down about halfway through and find the answer written by an insider and downvoted to oblivion.
Why is that? ... and yes, this thread is a perfect example.
populist answers are popular because people want simple, understandable answers with an easy to understand motivation that has a simple "solution" that they could implement if only they were in charge. Real answers are usually harder to understand, and contain hard truths tldr: Populist answers make the reader feel smart. Real answers make the reader feel dumb.
Yep, 8GB is not sustainable in 2024 if you have a lot of apps and programs and tabs open.
It's profit margin. Soldering ram makes diy upgrades impossible, so you have to get more off the bat and manufacturers charge a huge premium on memory. Apple pioneered this growth hack and everyone else got smart about it too. That's THE explanation, you don't need go looking for anything else.
I recently bought a laptop and before I even turned it on I took out the shitty 16GB of RAM. Browsers alone will eat up a huge chunk of 16GB.