Comment by talldayo
16 hours ago
Drives in particular. Let them solder the memory if they absolutely have to, but exposing even an empty NVMe slot should be standard for laptops. Unfortunately, Apple makes a pretty penny off the storage surcharge so I wouldn't really anticipate that anytime soon.
Even when Apple laptops had removable solid state storage, it used a non-standard connector[1]. Very consumer and repair hostile. While OWC still made thirds party drives for these[2], few (no?) other companies did.
[1] https://beetstech.com/blog/apple-proprietary-ssd-ultimate-gu...
[2] https://www.owc.com/solutions/aura-n2
They no longer even have a "memory" chip anymore, it's all part of the same SOC AFAIK, so they cannot "solder" it.
I will accept the trade off for the performance boost tbh.
What performance boost? As in, same software running for comparison on the hardware of interest, one soldered and the other not. I never heard that soldering your SSD on makes it faster...
It doesn't, Apples SSD performance is fine but unremarkable. Their current machines will do around ~6GB/sec read and ~5GB/sec write, which isn't even at the limit of socketed PCIe4 NVMe drives, nevermind the bleeding edge PCIe5 drives which can do up to ~14GB/sec read and ~12GB/sec write (albeit with excessive heat and power consumption for a laptop).
Soldering the RAM has legitimate performance benefits, but soldering the SSD is just to save space and upsell overpriced upgrades.
1 reply →
Sorry I was referring to the boost you get from having ram integrated into the chip vis-à-vis apple’s M-line of processors.
Having replaceable ram is not really a marketable feature these days.