this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
340 points (90.5% liked)
Technology
60062 readers
3086 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's actually an argument that makes the point of driving prices down with soldered RAM.
The individual memory chips and constituent components are cheaper than they would be for the same in a DIMM. We're talking about a very small difference, and bluntly, OEMs are going to mark it up significantly enough that the end consumer won't see a reduction for this (but OEMs will see additional profits).
So by making it into unupgradable ewaste, they make an extra buck or two per unit, with the added benefit of our being unupgradable ewaste, so you throw it out and buy a whole new system sooner.
This harkens back to my rant on thin and light phones, where the main point is that they're racing to the bottom. Same thing here. For thin and light mobile systems, soldered RAM still saves precious space and weight, allowing for it to be thinner and lighter (again, by a very small margin)... That's the only market segment I kind of understand the practice. For everything else, DIMMs (or the upcoming LPCAMM2).... IMO, I'd rather sacrifice any speed benefit to have the ability to upgrade the RAM.
The one that ticks me off is the underpowered thin/lights that are basically unusable ewaste because they have the equivalent of a Celeron, and barely enough RAM to run the OS they're designed for. Everything is soldered, and they're cheap, so people on a tight budget are screwed into buying them. This is actually a big reason why I'm hoping that the windows-on-ARM thing takes off a bit, because those systems would be far more useful than the budget x86 chips we've seen, and far less expensive than anything from Intel or AMD that's designed for mobile use. People on a tight budget can get a cheap system that's actually not ewaste.
I don't think the manufacturing cost is the driver there, the forced upgrade is. The argument isn't for saving $1-2 per unit or whatever, but forcing customers to pay $100-200 more for that memory upgrade they're not sure they need, but get because they can't upgrade later.
Yup, and that's a big reason why I don't buy those. Saving a little space and size is nice, but not at the cost of upgradability. In fact, that's why I bought an E-series instead of the more expensive T-series, the E-series didn't have soldered RAM.
The closest thing to a thin and light that I own is my framework.
I felt like anything less than what framework offers for repairability wouldn't be sufficient for me.