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?
That's your assumption - my point is that I don't care as long as it's actually good. The only part I really care about is the battery because it has a limited number of cycles that is shorter than the lifetime of the rest of the components.
If they were required to make things long lasting and repairable, they would put the effort into designing things this way, and you'll probably have laptops as perfect as you require, probably not much more expensive if at all in a few years but also have the required properties to f*ck our planet less.
That's the main issue with our current system, companies are only incentivised to maximize their profits, so they will happily f*ck our planet if they can save 1 cent in r&d on a 4000€ product.
> as a result laptop makers have no incentive to making long lasting repairable laptop and our planet will look like a giant electric waste (not counting the problem will producing the required minerals etc).
And yet pretty much every windows machine on the market right now has user replacable RAM, storage and batteries.
My point is that hardware is not changing at the same pace as it was - a laptop from 2015 with a fresh battery is absolutely perfectly usable in 2025. A laptop from 2005 would be unusable in 2015. An SSD would help you get from 2010 to 2015, but going from 2GB to the chipsets maximum 8GB is going to do nothing for the longetivity of the machine - that 2005 laptop processor is unlikely to even be able to boot a web browser.
My laptop from 2007 with an old core 2 duo cpu can boot a web browser fine. Some websites with "modern" web tech might not work well (ie it's slow), but I don't think the CPU is the issue here :)