[bkor]

> Socketed RAM

CUDIMM is changeable and fast.

> The user being able to swap parts easily is _neat_ but it's just not an required feature

Mostly because people seem to have forgotten that it was possible. Often laptops are slow to due either a too full disk and/or not enough memory. It used to be more common to upgrade those. But apparently that knowledge/skill is forgotten and it's now more custom to buy a new device.

Being able to change those saves money IMO.

[quailfarmer]

It's faster, but a big reason apple silicon is ahead is because the memory is co-packaged on an MCM. This is the direction things are going.

[bkor]

I noticed I made an error when remembering the memory type I saw a while ago.

I meant the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module)

That's a way to have the memory close, but still being able to change it (without e.g. hot air station or something).

[nottorp]

Not sure about that, although having those fixed short traces probably helps with speed, considering the stupid DDR5 negotiation on boot.

The real reason however is that going up SoC SKUs at apple gives you more memory channels. Those bandwidth increases you see in specs are because of that, not because the memory is soldered.

[culopatin]

People as in the general population were not doing it, just us weirdos.

I funded my early career years by doing IT for home users of all sorts of expertise and budget and I feel like I got a decent gauge at what the average user did during the replaceable hardware era.

The people in the middle class and below would end up with such a shit device out of the gate (those 400-600usd laptops at the time, lower outside of the us), that by the time they started complaining about slowness, the upgradeable things did not make a difference. 1 to 2gb ram with a shit Celeron? Hardly worth the money. Bottom shelf Core2duos, overheating, cracking hinges, etc.

Not to mention that even then not all laptops were very standard in the way they were built. Taking one apart could be very time consuming and they would pay by the hour for me to do it, so after labor it was above what the device was worth and it would only buy them a few months of time at most. You do that once and you realize next time you’ll get a desktop.

The richer people would just get MacBooks and only call me for software stuff.

Companies had thinkpads and once purchased would never go out the standarized build. Just swap them when out of warranty, or at the time most would actually work at a desk with a desktop and leave work at work.

[rangestransform]

CAMM was not good enough to saturate the memory bandwidth of AMD Strix Halo. Imagine telling people to use a standard that is already dead on arrival for top end machines

[thowawatp302]

Nah, personally? I know it’s possible, I’ve done it, and I just do not care anymore.

not worth it

[op00to]

It's certainly not worth it. I don't think that, for laptops, RAM requirements are increasing nearly as fast as they did 10 years ago. I spec 64GB for my laptops today, and if I could have afforded it, I would have specced 64GB 10 years ago too.