You shared a report showing how much money he likely makes from YouTube and asked me to clarify my view on it, which I did.
If you want me to address Rossmann's arguments in that video, I can't because I won't watch it. He lacks a basic engineering sense and his videos I've seen linked here in the past have been demonstrative nonsense. I won't waste my time or credit him any additional views.
If you want my views on soldered flash chips, I think I've made myself clear but here it is again:
Sockets are a common failure point. They have moving parts. They are assembled by fat fingered humans, not micron accurate machines. The high speed electrical connection is made by pressure, not metallurgy. Corrosion can happen at the interface. They wear under mechanical stress and vibration. If you want a reliable electrical connection solder it, don't push it together.
Touching things breaks them. Every time you open something, touch something, put your finger oils or accumulated static charge on something, you degrade its reliability. Every time you manipulate a socket or connector you wear it and reduce its reliability. Pins bend. Opening things violates seals, if not reassembled correctly you can stress things, breach EMI shielding, breach moisture sealing, fail to ground things properly, loosen screws leading to mechanical wear over time, over tighten screws leading to stress and fatigue, forget to properly power things down, bridge live electrical lines damaging components even if you have powered it down, short a battery pack, etc, etc, etc. If you want to make something reliable, don't touch it and don't make it easy for other people to touch it.
These types of failures are rather insidious and do not show up immediately. They can take months to manifest. Most often a first failure might be a system failure but a second failure is because of the human intervention.
When a part fails, it's very often not the source of that failure. It could indicate a failure elsewhere in the system where replacing a module will just lead to another future failure in that part or another because the underlying problem was not resolved by replacing the module. Replacing more of the system means fewer future failures because it captures the actual source of the problem.
That doesn't mean a chip won't fail. But the parts are soldered to the board just like many, many other parts. I see no evidence that they're the weak link in the life of the logic board and nobody seems able to provide any evidence beyond the anecdotal.
Reliability is the path to reduced ewaste, not modularity. If you want less waste, don't break stuff. When it comes to repairability, there's a clear tradeoff between time, cost, waste. Repair by replacement is often cheaper once transportation and time are accounted for, leads to fewer secondary failures, and a respectable repair shop such as Apple will recycle or refurbish any parts they can.
Likewise, if you want less waste buy what you need upfront and don't plan on incrementally updating it. Every time you update something you have another piece that needs to get shipped by boat, train and truck around the world to your door, the unit it replaces is most often thrown away in the kitchen trash, and you've rolled the dice on triggering a future failure somewhere in the system by tampering with it.
It's worth remembering that these are the parts we're talking about:
View attachment 2244351
8 separate chips mounted in 4 different locations around the main logic board.
How would one propose making that SSD modular? 4 separate modules with 4 separate sockets? Making the system thicker only to hold a second layer of board and components? Making the rest of a complex and highly optimized PCB layout less optimal so there is room for an 8 chip socketed rectangle somewhere?
All of those options mean a less optimized primary product that is less reliable, larger, and/or has less battery life.
So there are many, many pro-consumer arguments for soldered components before we need to look for nefarious intent by Apple.
If you are one of the few people who want to open an tinker with your computers, or who actually need to upgrade capabilities after purchase, then this isn't the machine for you. For the majority of people who never update their hardware, it makes for a better overall experience and lower TCO.
