Luckily for all of us, the need for constantly increasing system memory has slowed greatly over the past 10-15 years and the reliability of memory chips is very good.
As someone with 128GB in my main workstation and 64 in my laptop this soldered RAM trend makes me so sad. RAM is the cheapest way to improve your compute experience and using massive amounts is how I've otherwise been able to make old machines feel nice to use. I have a Lenovo T580 from 2018 and with 64GB it's a fantastic machine 5 years later, but I doubt a machine I buy now will be anywhere as good in 5 years as I won't be able to supercharge its memory to what 2028 would consider obscene for a laptop.
I am primarily concerned with power consumption when the laptop is asleep and ram is NOT persisted to disk (no hibernation). On a Linux setup in sleep mode, will there be a power consumption difference if you have 32GB vs 16GB of LPDDR but only use say 8GB of memory? If so will it typically dominate the sleep power consumption?
I can live with having ~1hr battery life (which I can push further anyway) with the way I operate and work...
Everyone I guess has different priorities. My company went remote so I don't have to be in an office or flying around all the time anymore, so I need less battery power.
the question is how much power compared to screen and cpu? If its like 4%, then I prefer not to have it.