What if you can't afford a top-specced model at the time of purchase? What if your memory chips fail after your warranty expired?

I pulled up Apple's pricing to check the exact numbers. On the 14" Macbook Pro, upgrading from 8 to 16 GB of RAM costs $200. I could get a 64 GB DDR5 SODIMM kit for only a little more from Newegg[0]. Again: upgrading the MBP from 512 GB of storage to 1 TB costs $200; meanwhile, even a high-end 2 TB NVMe SSD from Samsung costs less than $200 on Newegg[1].

There's no point in sacrificing repairability and upgradeability in that way, especially in cases where it doesn't make a huge difference in performance (from what I can find, Apple's storage speeds aren't faster than non-soldered storage, and LPCAMM's gimmick is that it brings soldered speeds in a removable package).

[0]: https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-64gb-262-pin-ddr5-so-dimm/p/N... [1]: https://www.newegg.com/samsung-2tb-980-pro/p/N82E16820147796