Comment by notJim

4 years ago

I find this type of rant rather unhelpful in this debate. It is not the case that there is no reason for soldered parts. This decision was not made out of spite or laziness. It was done because there was a belief that the product would be better. In particular, it seems that leaving sockets off enables you to make a thinner laptop, and that some of the products use a type of RAM that is not sold to be put into a socket [0]. I would guess that market research also showed that very very few consumers were replacing the Bluetooth chips in their Macbooks. I have a great PC next to me, but it also weighs 20-30 lbs, occupies a huge amount of space, and took me several days of work to make sure all the components would actually optimally work together.

I would find it a lot more compelling to talk about trade-offs than to just throw out uninformed ranting. We used to have laptops like what you're describing, and they no longer sell very well, or are no longer available because they are thicker and heavier than the models that replaced them.