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Take apart the phone and look at individual parts and you will find that this is absolutely the case. Every large scale electronics manufacturer uses this strategy.

And specifically in Apple's case they do spend more money doing stuff like soldering ram to the motherboard so customers can't upgrade them.

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As much as I dislike Apple policies on general, the RAM is not soldered, it's integrated in the SoC, and it makes a HUGE difference in terms of SPEED.

The soldered disk on the other hand... fuck that

They started soldering the RAM to the logic board on the mid-2012 MBP.

Initially this was discussing the iPhone.

It’s one of those happy times when everyone is right.

> And specifically in Apple's case they do spend more money doing stuff like soldering ram to the motherboard so customers can't upgrade them.

Doesn't soldering RAM to the motherboard cost less?

100%. Soldering RAM makes the engineering quite a lot easier, prevents a RAM module vendor from making profit, and gets rid of an entire assembly step because now you no longer need to install the RAM module.

The downside is a lack of flexibility, because you are now committed to a very specific RAM chip and you need to spend effort if you ever need to change that - rather than just plugging in one of a dozen modules.

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