Soldering the RAM to the board has performance advantages which must be addressed before we reverse the trend. LPCAMM promised similar (only slightly worse than soldered) performance/energy characteristics as soldered LPDDR5X and is said to be launching in 2024 so hopefully we get replaceable RAM back in 3~5 years.
They were soldering RAM on well before there were performance advantages - actually there were often performance disadvantages as the soldered on RAM was often a slower speed tier than what you could get cheaply just a few years later.
So the "lets solve that before we can swap-able RAM" argument doesn't really fly.
There are also Performance advantages to soldering the ram directly to the CPU die. So make the whole CPU with ram on it swappable then?
It's okay back then cause what you described is not a regression when they happened - "a few years later" doesn't count, most people don't buy laptop for upgradability.
For the last two DDR generations, we have:
- During the early days of DDR4: (soldered) LPDDR4-3200 vs (socketed) SO-DIMM DDR4-2400
- During the late days of DDR4: (soldered) LPDDR4-4266 vs (socketed) SO-DIMM DDR4-3200
- During the early days of DDR5 (now): (soldered) LPDDR5-7500 vs (socketed) SO-DIMM DDR5-5600
Good luck explaining "ok uh our latest laptop is slower than our last generation but hey you can change the RAM after a few years and it will be faster!" to ordinary users, then.
It's not just about upgrading, there's also the ability to replace a bad DIMM. Although upgrading is nice for the secondhand market since most laptop configurations are not the most high-end ones, and they're more likely to become e-waste if you can't make them the best they could've been.
yes, but how much of that was more that the laptop vendors for those models simply chose better RAM chips while the slower binned part got sold as mainstream modules?
What I mean is that your example might just be caused by something else not "we don't know how we can make fast ram on modules"
Definitely true. But unlike SSDs (ten years ago you'd get like 256GB, now it's more like 2TB) the ram curve is a lot more flat and it's fairly cheap to buy 32GB+ ram and imo that will future proof you for quite a while.
No, very often extra ram comes bundled only in high end configurations, so you have to buy a much more expensive i7 cpu, or you're charged an extraordinary amount (like +$1000 to go from 16GB ram/512GB ssd to 32GB ram/1TB ssd for a Microsoft Surface), or it's just straight up not available for the model you want.
And what if you want to buy used and upgrade?
Laptops without replaceable ram are disgustingly cynical e-waste and shouldn't be allowed.
