It is interesting that one of their examples is a "community repair fair", they want to market a sheen of social responsibility without actually taking part themselves.
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[1] https://beetstech.com/blog/apple-proprietary-ssd-ultimate-gu...
You don't realize how much it matters until it does, and then it changes everything. Always having to carry an external drive just because my email takes 150gb of the 256gb MacBook storage is even more annoying than windows puting candy crush saga on the start menu.
Soldering the RAM has legitimate performance benefits, but soldering the SSD is just to save space and upsell overpriced upgrades.
You have a very different email life than me. Is that like, all emails received in your life, or just huge attachments?
If that practice spreads to the MacBooks, you'll also need a CNC mill.
I’m afraid though that the core premise of your comment is flawed. Storage and especially memory are increasingly soldered to thin and lights. Even professional grade laptops such as the Thinkpad X1 Carbon have soldered memory.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-scourge-of-fully-soldered-...
I bought a Dell laptop in 2007 and I was able to "deselect" Windows and it actually had reduced the price. I could do that in the third world and online and in 2007 (again!). I also got home repair in not a tier 1 city of that third world country. I think we went degradingly backwards from there.
https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/M3-Macs....
It is true that it's not currently feasible to have socketed memory in a laptop offering 8+ memory channels to enable 200GB/sec+ bandwidth, but you can absolutely get the same (or greater!) memory speeds as an M-series CPU from an x86 desktop workstation.
If Intel/AMD wanted to prioritize memory bandwidth, they could probably work with JEDEC or another industry org to develop a new standard for socketed memory with multiple channels per socket, to enable the kind of speeds that Apple offers. The fact that they haven't (to my knowledge) indicates to me that they don't see it as a big enough priority or benefit.
[1] Dislaimer: I'm a community investor in Framework but have three of them because I like them a lot.
SMD and BGA are definitely headed in a direction of non-specialized solubility at an individual level. What will drive it most quickly is that it is easier and more precise than holding an iron, solder wire and two components together.
0. https://www.geektechnique.org/projectlab/726/diy-obsolete-ib...
A week ago, I helped a family member select a laptop. One of the criteria is either sufficient RAM to begin with (16GB puts them into a price class above what they actually need for other specs) or upgradeable RAM. It's definitely something I look at for myself and for those around me also -- more so than in the past because nowadays it has become a problem...
Thanks, I did not know this! I would have honestly have bought into Apple's marketing that the soldering is what allows them to make it more integrated and faster
The CAMM2/LPCAMM2 standard is a new way of having replaceable memory which takes up less physical space and is faster, if you're interested. There are a few laptops (and desktops) out there using it already. It still only supports dual-channel memory, though.
As I said originally, my suspicion is that "200GB/s+ memory bandwidth!" might be good marketing copy and make for good synthetic benchmark results, but just isn't actually that beneficial for the average computer user in the real world. This could be why you don't see other computer manufacturers pursuing it, at least not in laptops.
