https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/why-laptops-in-2024-use-soldered-ram/
This year Dell moved to soldered RAM for its XPS 14 and 16, writes Digital Trends, which "makes it impossible to upgrade, or even repair."
Of course, Dell isn't the first to make the transition. In fact, they're one of the last, which is what makes the decision so much tougher to swallow.
After two months of research, the article's author now acknowledges "there are tangible benefits to companies using soldered RAM, and all the people I spoke to while writing this agree that they outweigh the downsides, but how that applies to the end-user is a bit more complicated."
If there's one thing and one thing only that soldered RAM is indisputably good for, it's saving space. [Haval Othman, a senior director of experience engineering at HP] explained the benefits, saying: "If battery life, mobility, form factor (thin and light), and power efficiency are my priority among other design choices, then my mind immediately goes to soldered RAM; because that's where soldered RAM can be beneficial and power-efficient, which will lead to longer battery life. Plus, it's going to give me more space on the motherboard, so I can design the product thinner and lighter.
>If we want a thin product, the trade-off is soldering more of the devices onto the board."
In a laptop, there's only so much space that can be used for components, and that free space grows smaller by the year to make ultrabooks possible. They're an industrywide trend that was first popularized by Apple. Each year, laptops are released thinner and lighter, and that means having to squeeze the components together in new, innovative ways... Soldering the memory down onto the motherboard means that it can be attached almost anywhere within the laptop instead of being slotted into a specific part of it. The space saved by soldering memory can be used for other things, such as a bigger battery...
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>makes it impossible to upgrade, or even repair
skill issue
This is DRM taken into the physical realm... how are they allowed to do this?
Rossmann would not let this slide.
>Want upgradeable repairable thing
>Can't have it because the goy want slim fancy looking thing
I fricking hate people swear to god.
so much bullshit
I look like that
>Of course, Dell isn't the first to make the transition. In fact, they're one of the last, which is what makes the decision so much tougher to swallow.
Dell was also the first to develop something that mantains the benefits of soldered RAM while being user-serviceable.
Because laptops were never made to last more than 3-5 years.
The old Thinkpads are an anonmaly; these things were always designed to be abandoned and back in the day the benefits of buying a new laptop were a lot more impressive. You'd go from 40MHz CPUs and 8-16MB of RAM to 300MHz and 128-256MB of RAM and from there you'd get a 800MHz or even 1GHz CPU with 512MB to 1GB.
As hardware was rapidly evolving and changing it meant end users needed to be able to upgrade parts and bits so that it could keep up in an era where even year-old hardware was being surpassed in leaps and bounds.
Now that shit's slowed down they need a new way to make shit obsolete and RAM is all they got. They tried with TPM 2.0 but that was an abysmal failure and now they're trying with "AI chips" which will also fail because they both suffer from the same issue:
They're both solutions in search of a problem.
So unless some incredible new tech comes out that blows all the old stuff out of the water, shit's gonna be all about bottlenecking your ability to upgrade the RAM.
>The old Thinkpads are an anonmaly
Many other old laptops were upgradable.
notable DELL and Toshiba were great at upgrades at some point (Toshiba mostly in early 2000, Dell was at least to 2010)
I meant lasting more than a few years you dumb fricking animal.
Weird nerds are still using them.
weird all my lappies lasted at least 5-10 years current ones are 5-6yr and cant kill them litreally wet drop them
I would not call TPM a solution in search of a problem. It just is a problem that you don't face. You aren't a company providing 1,000 employees laptops.
i bet you fewer than 1% of laptop owners are going to upgrade their RAM at any point, so you might as well solder it in
the only people who change their laptop ram are chinkpad owners anyway
then you need to sell laptops with 16GB of RAM, not 4GB
but I bet even now the cheap laptops have 4GB
You can't even buy a laptop with 4GB ram these days. Have you just woken up from a 10 year coma
Yes you can, this isn't a Chromebook, it comes with W11.
>eMMC
If only you knew how bad things really are.
Good example of stupid things you can buy but not use...
(Unless you install another OS on it, that is.)
4GB is enough for windows
For around ten years now, upgrading laptop RAM has been just a meme. Just get 32GB RAM to begin with and you will never have to upgrade. We haven't made much progress in ten years, 16-32GB has been more than enough
this is only going to become standard
eventually all the ram will be on the SoC
it's inevitable
all the things IQfy likes will be phased out
When do you think desktop PCs are going to have the CPU and RAM soldered onto the motherboard, and the only custom parts you buy are the GPU (until that's integrated too), case, and RGB lights?
Unfortunate that they went straight to soldering it instead of waiting to implement camm
Not my problem. I don't use laptops. Laptops are for women and they buy another in few years. There is no need to use complex systems for laptops.
literally made my r15 r2 2020 useless espeically in sims like bng fs2020 and other games too fricking pisses me off
my 136k 64gb ddr4 ram build gpu blew up dunno what to do ill just wait for new gpus from intel and amd i guess
because you keep buying soldered ram