Apple positions itself as being on the side of the consumer, and while they never really justified their soldered-down RAM (on laptops), one _might_ argue that

Apple positions itself as being on the side of the consumer, and while they never really justified their soldered-down RAM (on laptops), one _might_ argue that it reduced failure rates. It's interesting that IBM discovered that soldering RAM to the individual compute modules in the Blue Gene/L (ca. 2004-2007) did improve reliability, in part because they had 2^16 modules in one cluster. I don't really buy that argument for laptop RAM, and especially not for SSDs, but I'm not sure if there's anything that can push back against Apple other than plain old competition, which they're trying to distance themselves from as much as possible, of course.