[kojoru]

> There's no technical reason, other than thinness, for the way Dell soldered the RAM down, for instance.

That's a sentiment that's been repeated a lot, and it's not fully true.

One important property that soldered-on RAM has is increased security. There's been a demonstrably practical way to break full-disk encryption with physical access to a turned on or sleeping computer by re-attaching the memory quickly to another computer. The keys then can be read from the memory.

That's not a vector you have anymore if the memory is not removable.

[collsni]

What type of data are we putting on these laptops? Nuclear keys?

Good security balances practicality. In my opinion that's a bad argument..

This is to save space, and is impactful to the longevity of the hardware and environment.

[mulmen]

It’s impactful but in what direction? How many repairable or upgradeable laptops actually got repairs and upgrades? Or was it just wasted material and energy in production?

I don’t have the answer but these things can be surprising.

[tarlinian]

The more important reason this is not true is that there is technically feasible DIMM form factor for LPDDR4/4x/5/5x RAM. And there are actual power savings (~20% reduction in J/bit transferred) to be had for using LPDDR RAM as opposed to similar generation DDR RAM. Laptops that support replaceable memory have to use DDR4/DDR5 and therefore cannot take advantage of the power savings you get from LPDDR4/4x memory.

[lostgame]

No amount of security or performance benefits can outweigh even the environmental/eWaste disaster alone that non-upgradable RAM chips/storage and lack of user replaceable batteries are responsible for.

Then there’s the cost thing. Have 8GB of RAM in your MacBook and want 16GB? Whoa, boy; that’ll cost you. That old computer’s pretty useless now, and we go right back to the eWaste problem.

Soldered RAM/storage/batteries are the epitome of greed in technology.

They prioritized the customer purchasing a whole new product over simply upgrading one component; creating a literal never-ending shit-stream of eWaste and products increasingly designed to stay properly functional for less time.

The law chases them; and instead of getting the message and smartening up; they find loopholes to get out of it.

There’s no excuse. It’s greed.

EDIT: More importantly - can we please stop making excuses for these greedy assholes, and start collectively working on change?

We need to start focusing on the planet, and this is a super easy start.

[scarface74]

So do you throw away perfectly good laptops - creating e waste - instead of just selling them and using the money to buy a new one?

[devit]

The proper solution to that is to use a CPU that supports encrypting RAM.

Soldering RAM does nothing since you can still, at least in principle, reattach it to another device.

[Teever]

Do you actually believe that this issue was discussed at all in any way by the engineers that Dell contracted to design this laptop?

Like do you actually think it was a factor at all in any way?