Think about Atari, Acorn, Amiga and such. While there were a few Pro like models, the majority of the home users were using the full packaged ones, with connection ports for external extensions.
Apple was the last one with this mindset, and thanks to their survival and success, that is the trend the industry is now returning to.
Specially given that computers have reached a plateau for 90% of the users out there.
If someone makes them as compact and replaceable i'm on board, i just haven't seen it. Not saying it's not possible of course :)
Just recently I was looking for a new laptop and ended up buying a refurbished thinkpad t430 (270e with 8gb [gonna become 16] ram, ssd and i5 3rd gen)just because I am sure I can change basically every part of it whenever I want for a low price.
Looking at current generation of soldered CPU and glue as building solution is off putting at best. It feels like a cheap toy produced in a sweat shop.
On the flip-side, we've gotten external GPUs through Thunderbolt. So we've gotten the ability to extend laptop GPUs.
Another positive development is that SSDs are likely to continue getting faster. Maybe RAM won't be upgradeable anymore, but if Intel can push out their Octane/3D XPoint tech, you might get SSDs so fast that you can get almost the same benefit swapping to a faster SSD as upgraded RAM.
I mean, you've never been able to upgrade your CPU cache. If RAM is a glorified cache for the SSD, why complain that you can't upgrade that anymore?
Maybe one day SSDs will be soldered on in laptops too though :/
>>If RAM is a glorified cache for the SSD This 'really' depends on your workloads and it's not always the case, even though it's often the RAM is mostly used as disk cache.