Out of chip interconnect is always going to be lower performance than having everything on the same die. Apple could technically use DDR4 and NVMe over PCI-e,

Out of chip interconnect is always going to be lower performance than having everything on the same die. Apple could technically use DDR4 and NVMe over PCI-e, but the modularity comes at the cost of a performance decrease. Personally, I've always thought that it's pretty weird that my NVMe SSD has a CPU and DRAM that I can't use for my own computing purposes -- I have that silicon there and I can't use it. It's kind of a waste unless you are doing something I/O heavy that the proprietary software running on that CPU thinks it can optimize. Imagine if the NAND flash was directly connected to your CPU; you could change how garbage collection, error correction, and redundancy works, right in your OS software. (This isn't really a pipe dream; it's common on embedded systems and Linux has lots of code exactly for this case. Code you can edit, code that has tests. Your off-the-shelf SSD is just a black box. Maybe there's not a bug that corrupts all your data under certain circumstances. But if there is, there is nothing you can do about it. And, that inflexibility and reliability on unauditable proprietary software comes at the cost of lower performance. Makes very little sense to me.) I feel like there is a strong push from the right to repair movement to have the government mandate obsolete technology, because of its ubiquity and interchangeability at a particular point in time. (For example, forcing Apple to use an NVMe M.2 SSD.) We've seen that in action before; look at things like FIPS. FIPS is behind the modern standards, so if you are required to use FIPS, your users are less safe. Doing the same with hardware means that it's easier to repair, but also slower. I'm not sure that's a good tradeoff. Finally, I'm not even sure that mandating connectors instead of soldering is a great idea. Look at things like the connectors between WiFi modules and antennas; they are rated for a maximum of 30 cycles, with most vendors recommending that you use them once. Not that repairable.