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The EU needs to fuck their shit up.
Mandate that laptops must have user replaceable storage and RAM (and tablets to have user replaceable storage). My old Dell laptop has windows in the bottom to get to both of those.
The loss of 3.5mm headphone jacks is nothing compared to the loss of that. They're common failure points and easy upgrade paths.
Upgradable RAM isn't as fast as non-upgradable RAM and that this is especially true for the way Apple Silicon is designed. So no we shouldn't be mandating something that reduces computer performance for the sake of an upgrade most people would never care to perform.
We should however force them to produce laptops with a certain minimum RAM and to reduce their ridiculous upgrade pricing.
Edit: also I don't own a single Apple product. I aren't a fan boy at all and I know they do a whole bunch of anti-consumer bs. I also know that modular RAM for Apple Silicon would be a terrible idea for that specific design. Modular SSDs on the other hand would be very doable.
Really? Why though? Is soldered-in RAM attached differently to the CPU?
Way differently.
Soldered RAM is much much closer to the CPU, and so the time it takes for signals to propagate back and forth is significantly reduced..
It's probably the increased capacitance (think of of it as a puddle that needs filling before the water can move beyond it) of a mechanical connnection system vs direct soldering that makes most of the difference.
I was going to call you out on the distance thing but I made the maths and indeed at 100GHz light only travels about 3mm between waves and electric signal propagation on a line is roughly lightspeed (if you disregard capacitance) so even though this memory bus is likely not working at 100GHz to get 100GB/s (it's actually using paralellism for increase bits per cycle) it is none the less already within clock speed ranges were distances of centimeters do mater.
That said keep in mind that rountrip propagation only really maters at the very biginning of the download of a memory block as that when the address goes down and the data starts coming back and the roundtrip propagation affects the delay between them.
But yeah, I can see how you would start worrying with centimeter and even millimiter distances when trying to extract a bit more performance from data exchanges at these clock speeds.