What about serviceability? These come with soldered in ssd?
That would be an issue for server use, Its too expensive to throw it away all for a broken ssd.
Having things consistently work is much cheaper than down days caused by your ancient equipment. Apple’s SSDs will make it to 5 years no problem - and more likely, 10-15 years.
Fast forward 2 years: The $50-$250K machines have a 100% drive failure rate, and some poor bastard has to fly from data center to data center to swap the $60 drive for a $120 one, then re-rack and re-image each machine.
Anyway, soldering a decent SSD to the motherboard board would actually improve reliability at all those places.
If they were soldered onto those systems you talk about, all those would have had to be replaced instead of just having the drive swapped out and re-imaged.