Technology

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.