Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop

I think the kind of laptop this person wishes should simply be made illegal to make. We cannot sustain having all electric devices being thrown after a year or two, these things need to last, to be repairable and make it easy to grab pieces and materials when they die anyway

I agree with him. My personal laptop is an m1 MacBook Pro, and 5 years on it’s still a better experience than my work laptop which is a high spec dell with an i9 and 32GB ram. I’m more likely to chuck the dell than upgrade it because whatever combination of stuff it’s doing just doesn’t work.

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.

The assumption here is that the MacBook is better because of soldering components rather than because Apple simply made a better chip and has a better OS than Windows.

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?

Apple Silicon is a slightly customized ARM processor soldered onto a main board. That's not the reason for it's better performance.

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