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Comment by lloeki

18 hours ago

This, although it's not merely "easier/cheaper", it's "impossible" (unless you sacrifice a ton of performance)

Same reason as a) GDDR on dGPUs (I think I read somewhere that GDDR is very much like regular DDR, just with much tighter paths and thus soldered in) and b) Framework Desktop (performance would reportedly halve if RAM were not soldered)

SSD reasons I seem to recall are architectural for security: some parts (controller?) that usually sit on a NVMe SSD are embedded in the SoC next to (or inside?) the secure enclave processor or whatever the equivalent of the T2 thing is in Mx chips, so what you'd swap would be a bank of raw storage chips which don't match the controller.

Apparently upgrading the SSD can be done, but it's a weird form factor and you need another Mac to restore it.