7 ms·

Worse, it's now all soldered in, so we can't even upgrade it. Like - fuck. this. shit. I will take - in a heartbeat - (we'd all better!) whatever slight decre

Worse, it's now all soldered in, so we can't even upgrade it. Like - fuck. this. shit. I will take - in a heartbeat - (we'd all better!) whatever slight decrease in performance and slightly larger design that comes from not being soldered in half a microsecond if it means I can actually upgrade the RAM later on after my purchase. Not just because I want continued value out of my purchase - because honestly, that's not even getting started on the amount of eWaste that must be created from this selfish, harmful; wasteful pattern. Think about all the MacBook Airs out there stuck with 4GB of RAM and practically useless 128GB SSD's that could be useful if Apple didn't intentionally make them useless. We've certainly gone very far backward in terms of any computer hardware worth purchasing in the last ten years. I really don't get the point, beyond greed - of this whole soldering garbage. No performance or size benefits can be worth not being able to continue to reap value from my investment a couple years down the road. This not only creates seriously less waste, but also nurtures a healthy, positive attitude of valuing our hardware instead of seeing it as a throwaway, replaceable thing. I truly hope environmental laws make it illegal at some point. The EU seems to be good with that stuff. The soldering issue accomplishes literally nothing beyond nurturing, continuing, and encouraging a selfish culture of waste that only gets worse the more and more accepted we allow it to become. We've only got one planet. It's way - way - WAY - past time we started acting like it. Ten years ago, the state of hardware was far more sustainable than it is now. For. Fucking. Shame.

javajosh 4y ago
I have 64G of RAM in my framework laptop with room for 64G more. It's not all bad. (The state of mobile phone storage (not to mention removable batteries) has gotten significantly worse over time. Heck, they even dropped the 3.5mm headphone jack which is honestly fucking insane.)
- lostgame 4y ago
  Framework is the only laptop I will consider purchasing in the future, for sure.
bombcar 4y ago
I remember the old setup - buy or build a PC, and a year or two later max the RAM (for significantly less now) and get another year or two out of it. Then for awhile you could use SSDs to do the same thing. But now it’s all laptops as far as the eye can see, with soldered RAM.
thenthenthen 4y ago
Im still daily driving my 2013 macbook air with 128gb ssd and well 8gb ram. 100’s of browser tabs, photoshop, kicad and illustrator often at the same time. Never reboot, always sleep. Runs Catalina. Best machine ever. [edit] while going through many eeepcs, several thinkpads and two desktop pcs in that period [edit2: these were prolly older than 10 years tho ;)]
- chaxor 4y ago
  I don't really understand how you do this. Even running archlinux with clamd and a tiny windows manager takes ~2-4 GB of RAM to do effectively "nothing". So, of course, MacOS takes ~8GB of RAM to do effectively nothing, such is about the same for windows. Unless you're running something like alpine Linux these days, you're going to be eating a ton of RAM and cycles for surveillance, telemetry, and other silly 'features' for these companies.
faeriechangling 4y ago
I’ve used those MacBook airs before and those weak dual core CPUs really don’t have much beef to them, and the screens are these 1440x900 TN panels (not sure about the vertical resolution) which was low spec even for the time. I don’t see upgradability being essential to longevity. I think you can just buy everything you need for the next decade on day one. The soldering uses significantly less power.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  When I bought my laptop this was exactly my thinking, so I immediately put 128GB aftermarket RAM into it.
- lostgame 4y ago
  >> I don’t see upgradability being essential to longevity. I think you can just buy everything you need for the next decade on day one. Wow, that statement reeks of having so much privilege it’s like you forgot that this isn’t financially feasible for a lot of people, and that upgrading down the line allowed someone to afford a lower spec computer at the time. Like - you do get not everyone’s wealthy af, yeah? And that companies intentionally bloat the cost of first party memory and stuff so that if you’re not insanely privileged; like I guess you are, then, no - it’s not even…it doesn’t even make sense. All this does is steal from the poor to give to the rich.
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    That’s a pretty wildly inaccurate guess given I bought that MacBook Air when I was in poverty. It was my life savings at the time. It’s a matter of efficiency, somebody pays for all those ram slots to get made and the electricity to power them. Now that computer memory is growing generation over generation at a slower rate, and now that other sources of power waste have been eliminated, I reckon there’s less and less reason to go with slots. It is a shame that this allows vendors to charge non-market prices for products but the problem I have is that this has become peoples main argument to preserve slotted memory. It’s an objectively inferior technology for mobile devices we use so we can pay market prices for memory. Realistically though, slotted memory is doomed if the only argument for it, since manufacturers have every incentive to stop offering the option of slots. Even if they wanted to offer a customer competitive market prices for memory there’s little reason they couldn’t do that with soldered memory.

javajosh 4y ago

I have 64G of RAM in my framework laptop with room for 64G more. It's not all bad. (The state of mobile phone storage (not to mention removable batteries) has gotten significantly worse over time. Heck, they even dropped the 3.5mm headphone jack which is honestly fucking insane.)

lostgame 4y ago
Framework is the only laptop I will consider purchasing in the future, for sure.

bombcar 4y ago

I remember the old setup - buy or build a PC, and a year or two later max the RAM (for significantly less now) and get another year or two out of it. Then for awhile you could use SSDs to do the same thing. But now it’s all laptops as far as the eye can see, with soldered RAM.

thenthenthen 4y ago

Im still daily driving my 2013 macbook air with 128gb ssd and well 8gb ram. 100’s of browser tabs, photoshop, kicad and illustrator often at the same time. Never reboot, always sleep. Runs Catalina. Best machine ever. [edit] while going through many eeepcs, several thinkpads and two desktop pcs in that period [edit2: these were prolly older than 10 years tho ;)]

chaxor 4y ago
I don't really understand how you do this. Even running archlinux with clamd and a tiny windows manager takes ~2-4 GB of RAM to do effectively "nothing". So, of course, MacOS takes ~8GB of RAM to do effectively nothing, such is about the same for windows. Unless you're running something like alpine Linux these days, you're going to be eating a ton of RAM and cycles for surveillance, telemetry, and other silly 'features' for these companies.

faeriechangling 4y ago

I’ve used those MacBook airs before and those weak dual core CPUs really don’t have much beef to them, and the screens are these 1440x900 TN panels (not sure about the vertical resolution) which was low spec even for the time. I don’t see upgradability being essential to longevity. I think you can just buy everything you need for the next decade on day one. The soldering uses significantly less power.

secondcoming 4y ago
When I bought my laptop this was exactly my thinking, so I immediately put 128GB aftermarket RAM into it.
lostgame 4y ago
>> I don’t see upgradability being essential to longevity. I think you can just buy everything you need for the next decade on day one. Wow, that statement reeks of having so much privilege it’s like you forgot that this isn’t financially feasible for a lot of people, and that upgrading down the line allowed someone to afford a lower spec computer at the time. Like - you do get not everyone’s wealthy af, yeah? And that companies intentionally bloat the cost of first party memory and stuff so that if you’re not insanely privileged; like I guess you are, then, no - it’s not even…it doesn’t even make sense. All this does is steal from the poor to give to the rich.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  That’s a pretty wildly inaccurate guess given I bought that MacBook Air when I was in poverty. It was my life savings at the time. It’s a matter of efficiency, somebody pays for all those ram slots to get made and the electricity to power them. Now that computer memory is growing generation over generation at a slower rate, and now that other sources of power waste have been eliminated, I reckon there’s less and less reason to go with slots. It is a shame that this allows vendors to charge non-market prices for products but the problem I have is that this has become peoples main argument to preserve slotted memory. It’s an objectively inferior technology for mobile devices we use so we can pay market prices for memory. Realistically though, slotted memory is doomed if the only argument for it, since manufacturers have every incentive to stop offering the option of slots. Even if they wanted to offer a customer competitive market prices for memory there’s little reason they couldn’t do that with soldered memory.