He is still right. It is a desktop PC that is less repairable than all other desktop PCs, from a brand that is known to champion repairability. They had a reason for it, but could've chosen to not create more throwaway things.
Soldered RAM, CPU, and GPU, that give space benefits and performance benefits is exactly what I want, and results in no more ewaste at all. In fact less ewaste, because if I had a smaller form factor I could justify keeping the older computer around for longer. The size of the thing is a bigger cause of waste for me than the ability to upgrade RAM.
Not everybody upgrades RAM, and those people deserve computers too. Framework's brand appears to be offering something that other suppliers are not, rather than expand ability. That's a much better brand and niche overall.
No. It's end of the line with consumerism and we either start repairing and recycling or we die. Framework catered to people who agree with that, and this product is not in line.
I have no idea why you would not upgrade your memory, I have done so in all PCs I ever owned and all laptops, and it's a very common (and cheap) upgrade. It reduces waste because people can then use their system longer, which means less garbage over the lifetime of a person. And as was already commented, it is not only about upgrades, but also about repairs. Ram breaks rather often.
Upgrading the RAM would have created more waste than properly sizing the RAM to COU proportion from the beginning.
It is very odd to encounter someone who has such a narrow view of computing that they cannot imagine someone not upgrading their RAM.
I have not once, literally not once have RAM break either. I have been part of the management of clusters of hundreds of compute nodes, that would occasionally each have their failures, but not once was RAM the cause of failure. I'm fairly shocked to hear that anybody's RAM has failed, honestly, unless it's been overlocked or something else.
Uncalled for and means the end of the discussion after this reaction. Ofc I can imagine that, it's just usually a dumb decision.
That you did not have to upgrade the ram means one of two things: You either had completely linear workloads, so unlike me did not switch to a compiled programming language or experimented with local LLMs etc. Or you bought a lot of ram in the beginning, so 8 years ago with a hefty premium.
Changes nothing about the fundamental disagreement with the existence of such machines. Especially from a company that knows better. I do not expect ethical behaviour from a bottom of the barrel company like Apple, but it was completely reasonable to expect better from framework.
One of the primary objections to soldered RAM was/is the cost to purchase. As the likes of Apple priced Ram upgrade at a hefty premium to retail prices.
But are Framework's RAM prices unreasonable? $400 for 64GB more of LPDDR5x seems OK. I haven't seen anybody object to Framework's RAM on those grounds.
My current laptop (ASUS GA503QM) had 8GB soldered and 8GB socketed. I didn’t want to go for the 16+16 model because it was way more expensive due to shifting from a decent GPU to a top-of-the-line GPU, and a more-expensive-but-barely-faster CPU. (I would have preferred it with no dedicated GPU—it would have been a couple of hundred USD cheaper, a little lighter, probably more reliable, less fiddly, and have supported two external displays under Linux (which I’ve never managed, even with nvidia drivers); but at the time no one was selling a high-DPI laptop with a Ryzen 5800H or similar without dedicated graphics.) So after some time I got a 32GB stick and now I have 40GB of RAM. And I gave my sister the 8GB stick to replace a 4GB stick in her laptop, and that improved it significantly for her.
You might be surprised. Living in a large city, everything I have put for sale has found a new owner. Old and seemingly useless computer hardware, HDMI cables that don't support 4K, worn-out cutlery, hairdryer that's missing parts, non-functional amplifier, the list goes on. If the price is right (=very low), someone has always showed up in person to carry these away. And I'm always very upfront about any deficiencies so that they know what they're getting.
I'd say a common profile for the new owner is young people who have just moved and are on a shoestring budget.
Without that, it's really not a interesting solution.
demanding replaceable ram means also not wanting the benefits of the integrated memory
Personally I think it's bad that apple products are so poorly repairable and so expensive to upgrade.