Give me something solid that will last 5 -6 years with a serviceable (I don’t care if it’s glued or torx’ed or whatever in, just as long as it’s replaceable) battery, and I don’t care if the RAM and SSD is soldered to the chipset.
In the past I’ve replaced spinning rust with SSDs and that’s given that machine a lease of life but those kinds of upgrades don’t really exist anymore - adding an extra 8GB ram isn’t going to turn my stupid dell machine into something that works.
Is there a reason to believe that if Apple didn’t solder memory on, it would make the performance/battery worse, as opposed to making the device slightly heavier/bigger?
Microsofts support for these is still kinda bad ime, which is easily the biggest impact on their battery longevity.
Furthermore, Most super intrusive and performance hindering spyware aka antivirus is only deployed on windows, hence it gets double-punched by having subpar processor support and wastage in the processes running in corporate environments. The latter being the biggest performance impact.
These are however all software, not hardware bound issues