Who said today’s electronic is unreliable ? I’m 53, my first Mac was a Macintosh… another one making assumptions on people who don’t know.
people justifying soldered RAM and SSD is just worshipping Apple no matter what. There is no technical reason to design a notebook that way, if not to maximize profits making it disposable.
These points have been thoroughly rebutted at this point. A nice illustration of how far we have come.
Here's a nice repairable item.
Introduced in 1966. This particular specimen was made in 1969, it is a Tektronix 453 oscilloscope. 50MHz bandwidth pretty standard dual trace oscilloscope but it was the first properly
portable unit on the market that wasn't crap. It takes a strong person to carry it. Every single part is replaceable in it and most parts can be replaced today. This particular specimen is currently being repaired by me because, well it's fun getting your hands dirty. However reliable it is not. It runs for about 200 hours before something fails and it needs a repair and recalibration. Repair requires extensive knowledge of electrical engineering (try even comprehending a quantum tunnelling diode based trigger) and the diagnostics take hours. The parts are expensive even today. Inflation adjusted pricing puts the original cost of this particular piece of kit at $19,500 (yes 19 thousand dollars) in 2023 dollars.
Your first Macintosh was actually built on the pillars of that machine which broke a lot of new ground at the time. The learnings of millions of man hours of engineering analysis went into it and every thing we built since has been like that. Hugely complex arrays of components were shrunk and normalised into integrated circuits, then they were reduced in size constantly and performance increased by orders of magnitude. Eventually manufacturing by hand became difficult and machines were introduced. Then things got smaller and simpler. Repeat over and over again.
Every single step we took pushed us along from that quite remarkably short 200 hour service life and extreme initial cost and hourly service cost (us engineers are much more expensive than an SSD) back to something that literally lasts years with no service.
Your soldered on RAM and your soldered on SSDs are part of that. Better integration, less mechanical connections, easier and cheaper replacements (just replace the whole assembly!). For the edge cases where people want to do this, which are I assure you extremely few cases out of the millions of machines they ship, you're SOL. Sucks to be a 1-percenter. But adding additional cost and reliability problems do not necessarily result in a better product for the majority of users.
There is some movement I see on the SSD front with the Mac Mini and that's only used because the number of SKUs they need to keep on hand or build to order is multiplied considerably by the disk options available. 99.9% of those Mac Minis will never see a different SSD installed.
Anyway you can have all of that if you want to pay $19500 for your computer. But you don't I bet.
